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SciFinder Scholar

General

SciFinder is the enhanced electronic form of Chemical Abstracts from its inception in 1907 to the present.  It is only available to UTSA faculty, staff and students.

Access

SciFinder is only accessible at selected workstations: (a) LAN workstations at the John Peace Library on the 1604 Campus; (b) on the PC Workstation at the Downtown Campus.  (You must have a librarian log you on.)  (c) and at UTSA faculty and laboratory station that have the proper software loaded.  (Special client software is available for campus downloading in offices and labs.)  Not available off-campus.  Only available to UTSA faculty, staff and students.

Modes of Searching

Chemical Substance:  There are three ways to search for a chemical substance:

1. Chemical Structure:  This allows one to draw the structure. This is very useful when one does not know the name of the compound or has a ring compound.
   
   
2. Substance Identifier: By this means one can search by substance name (either common or formal IUPAC) or by an identifying number such as the CAS Registry number.  (There is a CAS Registry number for every substance including the individual cis or trans isomers or individual optically active isomers.  These numbers can locate a given compound no matter how many common names or isomers it has.  When one searches by CAS Registry number one does doesn't have to worry about complex names which often include unusual symbols not found on the standard keyboard.)
   
   
3. Formula:  One can search by the chemical formula e.g., C8H8O or HNO3, etc.
   

Topic. One can search any topic in this mode.  Searching is in natural language (as one would speak) as opposed to Boolean searching (which uses the operators AND, OR and NOT).  This means one can phrase the search in exactly the way one thinks of it instead of worrying about constructing a logical search statement.  However, the tradeoff for the ease of constructing this search is that one loses the precision of Boolean searching.

Author. Author searching is straightforward.

1. 1.One must search using a last name.
   
   
2. 2.One can search using first name or initial.
   
   
3. 3.SciFinder does an expanded name search.  For example, searching last name "McDonnell" and first name "Richard" brings up "McDonnell R", "McDonnell R W", "McDonnell Richard", and "McDonnell Richard W".
   
   
4. 4.The default is to search alternates of the name.  E.g. "McDonald" also brings up "MacDonald".
   

Document Identifier. This includes searching by Chemical Abstracts number or patent number.

Company Name/Organization.  One can search by the name of a company or organization, e.g., Kodak, UTSA, etc.

Browse. Browse allows one to peruse the tables of contents of selected journals indexed in SciFinder.  Clicking on the "Browse" button brings up a list of over 1,700 journal titles listed alphabetically.  Browse works best for current awareness.  Looking for the table of contents for an older issue can be time consuming as the current issue table of contents appears first and one must click through all the intervening issues to reach the older table of contents.

Doing a Search

Doing a Search in Substance Mode brings up a screen that contains the CAS Registry number and access to the following choices:

• Viewing a 3-D model (not present in all cases)

  The model is rotatable and can be viewed in a number of forms, e.g., line, stick, ball and stick, scaled ball and stick, CPK, and polyhedron.

• Commercial source for purchasing the compound (not present in all cases).
• Regulated chemical listings (not present in all cases).  This includes alternate names and toxicological data from sources such as the EPA.
• One can click on the "Get References" button at the bottom left which brings up a screen that allows one to narrow the results to a certain type of article, e.g., reactions, spectral, crystal structure, analytical studies, etc.  Clicking on OK from this screen yields a list of citations with the chosen limitations.
• There is a "Refine Search" button on the bottom right that limits the search by availability or inserting a structure.

Doing a Search in Topic Mode.  Doing a search in this mode gives one the choice of obtaining a list of citations containing:

1. the exact phrase only, e.g., "the oxidation of ketones"
2. the major terms in close proximity.
3. the major terms.
4. one of the major terms.

Doing a Search in Document Type Mode takes one directly to a list of citations.

Doing a Search in Company/Organization Mode takes one directly to a list of citations authored by the company/organization or where the authors are affiliated with the company/organization.

Further Narrowing of the Search

All citation lists have an "Analyze of Refine References" button.  Clicking on this button allows one to narrow the citation list by applying various limits such as author, company/organization, CAS Registry number, document type, index term, journal, language, publication year, and a few other less useful limits.  One can even limit to full image availability.  One can also change the sort order from reverse chronological to alphabetical or frequency appearance of the search item.

Abstracts & Full Image

   Abstracts. For the abstract, click on the microscope icon to the right of the citation.  Included with the abstracts are the indexing terms, the registry numbers for other compounds in the article, and the footnote citations contained in the article (many with hot links to the cited article's abstract).

   Full Image. If the full image of the article is available electronically, there will be an icon with a computer pictured on it to the right of the citation.  Clicking on this icon takes one to ChemPort.  Through ChemPort one can connect to sources that the UTSA Library has full image access to.  ChemPort works very well for ACS journals and recent patents.  With commercial publishers, this cross link sometimes fails even though the Library has full image access.