Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 12, Issue 6; June 2006

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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Chemistry 2000 [c2k]: Chemistry 2000 (c2k) is continuing to provide up to date information about chemistry departments, learned societies and chemistry journals around the world. Since the last report in June 2005 (Chem. Inf. Lett. 2005, 10, #6, 69). The database now lists 1860 departments from 139 countries. The United States of America has the most department (637 - down slightly from last year), followed by France (101) and then Germany. Britain is in fourth place. The French academic system is not arranged in the same was as the British one, and this probably inflates the number of departments listed. There are now 2989 sites listed in total (departments, learned societies and journals), of which about thirty are inaccessible in a typical month. The database has slightly fewer entries than last year.
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Google Trends: Google Trends gives a measure of the popularity of particular subjects amongst all Google searches. For example, it is possible to compare chemistry, physics and biology. The Philippines, Pakistan and India use these search terms more than other countries, as a proportion of their total use. In the USA, chemistry is the most popular of the three, but in the UK, biology and chemistry are almost equal.
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Public Science in the USA: The Cornyn-Lieberman bill (PDF) requires the NIH and other USA-government agencies to create an on-line list of all publicly accessible research papers. Some publishers and learned societies oppose the bill, despite the benefit of easier access to publicly-funded research.
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InterDok: InterDok has announced its Directory of Published Conference Proceedings is now free.
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eMolecules: Chmoogle is now eMolecules. The site claims to put 'the world's most powerful cheminformatics system into the hands of the "common chemist"' although its results usually seem to be limited to information from PubChem and some chemical suppliers.
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Electrochemical Society: The Electrochemical Society has announced the opening of the ECS Digital Library
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Spectroscopy Now: SpectroscopyNow (Chem. Inf. Lett. 2002, 5, #1, 3) and separationsNOW, two free websites from Wiley, have been relaunched.
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CAS Information Use Policies: CAS Registry Numbers are regulated, so databases may use no more than ten thousand of them before paying for a license.
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Needles in haystacks: Is it possible to find information from noisy data? Ramani Pilla and colleagues from Case Western Reserve, have reported a new approach in Phys. Rev. Lett., which has a geometrical interpretation as well as broad application.
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IUPAC-NIST Solubility Data Series Database: With the March 2004 update, this freely available database includes contains over 67,500 solubility measurements.
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Garfield's essays: Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Scientific). A collection of his essays and comments are available, including remarks on citations and peer review.
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Pubchem: The discussions between the ACS and the NIH over PubChem were last mentioned in Chem. Inf. Lett. 2005, 11, #4, 48. A letter from the past president of the ACS, William Carroll, was sent to the NIH in March, according to the SPARC OSForum which obtained it under the US Freedom of Information Act. The response from the NIH is also on the same forum. A blogger has also sent a response.