Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 6, Issue 6; June 2003

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman


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Chemistry 2000 [c2k]
Chemistry 2000 now has a list of countries in order of the number of chemistry departments with WWW servers. USA is top by a considerable amount. Many countries have a broadly consistent definition of chemistry. France is high up the list, with 111 entries, as chemistry departments are relatively rare, so research groups and centres are listed separately. The number of chemists in France that have been found for the list of people is only 88, compared with 429 for Italy and 464 for Canada, which have 45 and 52 departments listed, respectively.

Over the last months, China and India have both moved up the list, and it may be anticipated that they will continue to rise. Some countries use 'edu' to signify educational establishments whilst others use 'ac' for academic organisations. A few countries use both.

There are other lists of chemistry departments, notably ChemDex run by Mark Winter at Sheffield Unversity and the WWW virtual library hosted at Liverpool University as Links for Chemists and run by Michael Barker. All the main indexes of this type are based in the UK, and I am not aware of current competitors in other countries. Both of these have a broader scope than c2k, including many companies as well as chemistry departments. Currently, they include fewer chemistry departments than c2k. Other resources, such as PsiGate have fewer links, but each one has been evaluated and reviewed.

Google is so effective that the need for lists of chemistry departments and chemists may have diminished. However, there are questions for which Google cannot compete. For example, in order to find out about a chemist or department with a common name, or to be sure that a representative sample of departments have been covered in a particular area, or to compare the importance of chemistry in universities in different countries, a Google answer is hard to interpret, and a reasonably complete and up to date list is more useful.

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Chemistry Rules Interface
MDL has announced the Chemistry Rules Interface (formerly Cheshire) a chemical structure manipulation service with major extensions to chemical representation. MDL Chemistry Rules Interface is currently in use at over 125 sites supporting chemical structure representation and business rules implementation.

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Indian Academy of Science Journals
The Indian Academy of Science publishes a series of science journals, including several which are chemistry-related. Articles may be downloaded as PDF files.

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ICSTI
The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) has the mission of promoting recognition of the value of scientific and technical information to the world's economic, research, scholarly and social progress, and enhancing access to and delivery of information.

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Chem Bio Informatics Society
This Japanese association was founded in 1981, and has sponsored many meetings, financially supported by members of the CBI Company association, which included a many leading Japanese companies in the fields of pharmaceuticals, chemicals and computers as well as informatics. Chem-bio-informatics also has had a division in the Japanese National Institute of health sciences, although it has been reorganised to the Division of Safety Information on Drug, Food and Chemicals.

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The Agora
An electronic infrastructure for the scientific community to query, deposit, review, and curate information on biochemistry.

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ChemExper
Search for chemical by name or structure. The ChemExper database currently contains over 100,000 structures. The service may be compared to ChemFinder from CambridgeSoft, which provides similar search facilities to a larger database, but only offers a limited service without a subscription.

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Metalloproteins
A database run by the Metalloprotein structure and design program at the Scripps Research Institute.

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Chemical Thesaurus
This chemical thesaurues is not available directly on-line, but may be freely downloaded. The NIH also has a thesaurus, focussed on alcohol and other drugs which is available on-line.

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TOXLine
TOXLINE is the National Library of Medicine's collection of bibliographic information on biochemical, pharmacological, physiological, and toxicological effects of drugs and other chemicals. A component of TOXLINE is available on TOXNET (Chem. Inf. Letters, 2002, 4, #6, June 2002), which has a searching facility.

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MOLEKEL
A molecular graphics package for visualizing molecular and electronic structure data, available free of charge. Latest version: November 2002. The program was developed at the University of Geneva, the ETH and the Swiss Centre for Scientific Computing by Peter F Flukiger and Stefan Portmann. The manual is available on-line.

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Einstein Archive
On-line access to Albert Einsteinšs scientific and non-scientific manuscripts. The site allows browsing and viewing 3,000 digitized images of Einstein's writings. In addition, the Archival Database allows access to about 43,000 records of Einstein related documents.

© 2003 J M Goodman, Cambridge
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