Chemists have long been familiar with search engines that aspire to index a large proportion of the chemical literature. Think for example the old-generation (and commercial) SciFinder (Scholar) and Reaxys or those that arrived in the 1990s in the online era‡ such as the non-commercial Pubchem or ChemSpider (there are more). But you may not be as familiar with the latest generation of global search engines and here I will focus on three relatively new ones that specialise specifically in tracking down data rather than just publications.
I will illustrate first using a regular or non-advanced search. The keyword will be obtusallene, which is selected largely because it is a relatively unique string which is likely to result in fewer false positives. It is a family of marine alkaloids containing, unusually, bromine and /or chlorine[1] and the citation here is to a journal article describing some of its chemistry. But what if you want to find data associated with such molecules?
As these three advanced queries imply, there are many more ways of constraining the search, which I will describe at a later time.
I think these new-generation search engines specialising in data have lots of exciting potential. They are still maturing and I hope we will see some interesting new capabilities emerge which we have not had before.
‡All are on-line nowadays, but engines such as SciFinder had two previous existences, from about 1980 as CAS online using merely a terminal interface, and prior to that as printed copies to be searched manually.
In the mid to late 1990s as the Web developed, it was becoming more obvious…
I have written a few times about the so-called "anomeric effect", which relates to stereoelectronic…
The recent release of the DataCite Data Citation corpus, which has the stated aim of…
Following on from my template exploration of the Wilkinson hydrogenation catalyst, I now repeat this…
In the late 1980s, as I recollected here the equipment needed for real time molecular…
On 24th January 1984, the Macintosh computer was released, as all the media are informing…
View Comments
A well-hidden secret for some search engines at least is what is rather intimidatingly referred to as advanced search Thus with Google, you have https://www.google.com/advanced_search and also search operators (described at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 ) which enhance the regular searches for websites. This has been joined by http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search (for images) where you can control fields such as Size, Aspect ratio, Color, Type (face, animated, etc.), Site or domain, Filetype, SafeSearch, Usage rights (find images that you have permission to use). Some of this latter category also might come in useful for data.
I have asked Google if such an advanced version of their data search https://datasetsearch.research.google.com might exist, to match the equivalent searches possible at DataCite.