ChemInformer Chemistry Information from Rutgers University Libraries

Graduate Student lightning talks are being co-sponsored by the Graduate Student Association and Rutgers University Libraries.

Please plan to join us to hear about our graduate students’ research! Take a break from your studies with some food, fun, and conversation.

We have a couple of spots left for presenters- it’s not too late to share your research in an informal atmosphere. Please contact laura.palumbo@rutgers.edu for more information.

Register to attend: http://tinyurl.com/RUlightning

Thursday, April 28th
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Alexander Library, Pane Room
Food will be provided
Cost: Free!

We hope to see you there!

A recent article in Chemical & Engineering News reminds us of the necessity of proper lab safety. To help you find resources about this important topic, I’ve added a research guide to the Libraries website on Chemical Laboratory Safety, available at http://libguides.rutgers.edu/chem_lab_safety.

Please send me any suggestions for resources to be included, and stay safe!

The ACS has “strongly encouraged” authors to get an ORCID identifier, but recent communications to librarians indicate that this year ORCID identifiers will become mandatory in order to publish in an ACS journal.

You may have heard me mention ORCID before, as a way to help others find your work. An ORCID ID is like a social security number for authors; it distinguishes you from others with the same or similar names. It is also handy if you have ever changed your name, or expect to change your name in the future. Getting an ORCID identifier is quick and easy; it literally takes only a few minutes. Get yours here: http://orcid.org/

Linking your ORCID identifier to your previous work can be done from Scopus or Web of Science (through your ReasercherID), as well as by exporting BibTex records from your Google Scholar account. For more information about these databases or ORCID, please e-mail me at laura.palumbo@rutgers.edu.

ACS Publications has announced that they plan to partner with figshare in order to enable sharing of research data associated with articles. Figshare is a data repository which makes research data publicly accessible. Articles in ACS journals will link to associated data in figshare via a widget, and ACS plans to allow authors to deposit their supplementary data (SI) along with journal submissions. DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) will be assigned to datasets so that they can be cited.

You can see the ACS/figshare portal at http://acs.figshare.com, and preview the interactive figshare data portal in this JACS article.

For more information, see the ACS announcement and the one on figshare.

A recent post in the PubChem Blog announced the addition of Laboratory Chemical Safety Summaries for over 3000 compounds found in the PubChem database. LCCS information is based on the recommendations found in Prudent Practices in the Laboratory: Handling and Management of Chemical Hazards, 2011. “It includes a summary of hazard and safety information for a chemical, such as flammability, toxicity, exposure limits, exposure symptoms, first aid, handling, and clean up.” (PubChem)

The LCSS data from PubChem is freely available, and “can be downloaded as a data stream in bulk or on-demand from the PubChem website.” For more information about LCSS data on PubChem, see their page, About LCSS.

As part of the CIC, we are now members of HathiTrust. HathiTrust is a digital library with “..millions of books, government publications, dissertations, journals, and other published and unpublished materials. Created by a partnership of academic and research institutions, the Library offers materials digitized from collections in libraries around the world and including a wide range of languages. Titles published prior to 1923 and those that are open access or Creative Commons-licensed are available full-text. Other materials include limited-access searching.” More information is available here, HathiTrust FAQ, along with training videos.

To access HathiTrust, go to http://www.hathitrust.org, and click on the button to log in. You will see a drop-down with a list of member institutions; select Rutgers University from the list. You will need to log in with your netID and password. You can then search full text in the search box, or by clicking the link for advanced search to search by text, title, publication year, language, or format.

To see the free chemistry content, you may want to try browsing by call number. Go to http://www.hathitrust.org/visualizations_callnumbers_pd, and scroll down to call number range QD for chemistry, and click on that link. These are titles available in the public domain (i.e. published before 1923) and there are nearly 5600 of them. More are being added daily.

Also available is the HathiTrust Research Center. Members can use the Research Center for data extraction in pursuing their own research. Please see this helpful guide, Getting Started With The HathiTrust Research Center by Digital Humanities Librarian, Francesca Giannetti.

Please let me know if you have any questions- we would be happy to help.

Yes, you read that right. There is now a free structure searching program available to search all chemical compounds in Wikipedia. It was developed by Peter Ertl, Luc Patiny, Thomas Sander, Christian Rufener and Michaël Zasso. See the article in the Journal of Cheminformatics, DOI: /10.1186/s13321-015-0061-y (Wikipedia structure browser: Substructure and similarity searching of molecules from Wikipedia)
Try it here: http://www.cheminfo.org/wikipedia

Additionally, structure searching is now available in Web of Science. On the search page, click on the drop down next to Basic Search, and select Structure Search. This will take you to a drawing editor similar to ones you are already using. You will need to have Java installed, and download the Accelrys JDraw Applet. For instructions on using the drawing editor and to download the applet, see this page, available through the Help menu on Web of Science; or feel free to contact me at laura.palumbo@rutgers.edu.

The Libraries will be hosting Kiptyn Locke, from LabArchives http://www.labarchives.com/, who will demonstrate their Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) platform on February 26, from 10:00-11:30 a.m., in Alexander Library’s Teleconference Lecture Hall, on the fourth floor.

From the LabArchives website, some of the reasons to consider using an electronic lab notebook are to:

• Organize your laboratory data
• Preserve all your data securely, including all versions of all files
• Share information within your laboratory
• Keep abreast of developments in your lab even when traveling
• Collaborate with investigators by sharing selected data from your ELN
• Publish selected data to specific individuals or the public
• Protect your intellectual property

In 2014 LabArchives became the only ELN member approved by Internet2 Net+. Enterprise site-wide licensing is held by numerous academic institutions such as Caltech, Cornell University, Yale University, UT Southwestern, Tufts University, University of Wisconsin, University of Sydney and many others.

As one of the early team members with LabArchives, Kiptyn Locke has met with academic institutions around the country to learn about their respective needs and interests, and to then work with LabArchives’ development team to continually evolve and enhance the product offering. Today Kiptyn has a dedicated focus helping to enhance data management tools and educational resources with academic institutions in the NorthEast.

I hope to see you on the 26th! For more information, please contact me at laura.palumbo@rutgers.edu

Need to find an obscure chemical property? An important formerly print resource for “..physical, thermodynamic, mechanical, and other key properties…”, the International Critical Tables of Numerical Data, Physics, Chemistry and Technology, is available online for free from Knovel. “In 2003, Knovel undertook the conversion of this publication into full-text searchable electronic format that makes data easily accessible. 7 most important tables were made interactive for increased searchability and user-friendliness.”

You can access it through the link in my research guide, along with links to several other free and subscribed resources for chemical properties and spectra.

The latest upgrade to SciFinder includes improvements to the non-java structure editor (my favorite- the eraser!) And a very useful new feature is an improved chemical supplier table which now includes, in some cases, pricing information and estimated shipping times.

For more information, please see
http://www.cas.org/products/scifinder/what-s-new-in-scifinder.

As always, if you need more information, please contact me at laura.palumbo@rutgers.edu.

~ Laura