CAS Extends Access to Additional Research from Early 20th Century

CAS Extends Access to Additional Research from Early 20th Century



CA Databases Add More Than 7,000 Publication Records back to 1900



Philadelphia, August 23, 2004 - CAS has expanded its "Scientific Century" project by making thousands of additional early 20th century articles from American Chemical Society (ACS) journals and others available online. Planned for release in September, the enhanced content will enable researchers to access more than 7,000 additional records back to 1900, including publications even older than the beginning of Chemical Abstracts (CA). CAS announced the expanded access during the ACS National Meeting being held this week in Philadelphia.



"We have learned from the scientists and information specialists who rely on our information services that 'more is better,' and literature from an earlier era can contain findings highly relevant to current research," said Dr. Matthew Toussant, CAS Vice President, Editorial Operations. "Now we have gone even beyond the traditional coverage of CA to make thousands of published studies easily accessible online."



Included in the newly added information accessible through STN.

services, SciFinder and SciFinder Scholar is material from ACS journals and other sources, as described below:



o Journal of the American Chemical Society - more than 1,500 records, including abstracts for journal articles and summaries for book reviews;



o Journal of Physical Chemistry - more than 5,200 records, including abstracts of articles published in the journal plus other "abstracts of interest" to the journal (i. e. published in other sources of the time); and



o more than 400 documents of lasting importance published from 1900 - 1912 in various sources and not originally covered in CA.

These are landmark publications cited in CA/CAplus files since 1998.



Among the early literature studies that continue to be cited in more recent publications are a paper on radioactive substances by Marie and Pierre Curie in Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (1902); a study by Emil Fischer on amino acids, polypeptides, and proteins in Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft (1906); and a paper by Victor Grignard regarding organometallic combinations of magnesium and their application to the synthesis of alcohols and hydrocarbons, from Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (1900).



Since CAS announced the Scientific Century project in 2001, more than

3.5 million documents from the first half of the twentieth century have been added to the online CA and CAplus files. In total, 23 million records for journal articles, patents, symposia, books, and other documents of scientific interest are available in these databases, which are accessible though SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar and the STN services, including STN Easy and STN on the Web.



CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is an organization of scientists creating and delivering the most complete and effective digital information environment for scientific research and discovery.

CAS provides pathways to published research in the world's journal and patent literature - virtually everything relevant to chemistry plus a wealth of information in the life sciences and a wide range of other scientific disciplines - back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

In addition to offering STN in North America, CAS publishes the print version of Chemical Abstracts (CA), related publications and CD-ROM services; operates the CAS Chemical Registry; produces a family of online databases; and offers the SciFinder desktop research tool. The CAS Web site is at http://www.cas.org.