Posts Tagged ‘molecular search engines’

A newcomer in the game of how we find and use data.

Saturday, May 17th, 2014

I remember a time when tracking down a particular property of a specified molecule was an all day effort, spent in the central library (or further afield). Then came the likes of STN Online (~1980) and later Beilstein. But only if your institution had a subscription. Let me then cut to the chase: consider this URL: http://search.datacite.org/ui?q=InChIKey%3DLQPOSWKBQVCBKS-PGMHMLKASA-N The site is datacite, which collects metadata about cited data! Most of that data is open in the sense that it can be retrieved without a subscription (but see here that it is not always made easy to do so). So, the above is a search for cited data which contains the InChIkey LQPOSWKBQVCBKS-PGMHMLKASA-N. This produces the result:
datacite1
This tells you who published the data (but oddly, its date is merely to the nearest year? It is beta software after all). The advanced equivalent of this search looks like this:

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