Teaching Chemical Information:
Tips and Techniques

— August 1998 —

Chemical Literature (Chem 184/284)
University of California at Santa Barbara

Lecture 2: Types of Primary Literature

Primary Literature: Publication of Information

• Publication is, as the name implies, the making public of information, by whatever means—oral, printed or electronic.
• Publication has become a means not only for disseminating information, but also a tool for evaluating a scholar's performance: “Publish or perish.”

Types of Publication

The major forms of primary scientific publication include:

• Journals
• Technical Reports
• Patents
• Conference Papers
• Dissertations
• and a recent addition…Electronic Publications

Scientific Journals

The scientific journal was invented in the mid-1600’s as a means of speeding scholarly communication: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. As science grew, so did the volume of literature and the specialization of journals. Today there are over 100,000 scientific journals.

Types of Journals

Journals vary widely in degree of specialization, from:

• Nature; Science
  Very broad, covering all of science (more or less…)
• Journal of the American Chemical Society; Physical Review Letters
  Covering all of a major section of science, such as chemistry, biology or geology.
• Journal of Organic Chemistry; Biochemistry
  Covering a major subsection of science, such as organic chemistry or solid state physics
• Biological Mass Spectrometry; Fullerene Science and Technology
  Covering a highly specialized area of research.

Types of Journal articles

• News and reviews: Science News; Chemical & Engineering News
  These magazines specialize in short summaries of “hot” current research, usually in language aimed at the non-specialist, written by professional journalists (with some scientific background) rather than by professional scientists.
• Major reviews: Accounts of Chemical Research; Chemical Reviews
  These journals specialize in longer articles summarizing the research in a particular field, usually over a specified chronological range. These are generally written by scientists who are expert in the field.
• Major original papers: Journal of the American Chemical Society; Tetrahedron
  These journals (the majority of scholarly journals) carry full-length articles on original research.
• Brief communications: Tetrahedron Letters, Physical Review Letters
  Some journals specialize in rapid publication of short announcements of research results.
• Mixtures of the above: Science; Nature
  Some journals carry several or all of the above types of articles.

Peer Review

• The majority of scientific journals publish peer-reviewed articles, also called refereed articles.
• In these journals, the editor sends submitted articles out to persons expert in the field of the article.
• The referee comments on the article and the research it presents.
• The editor then decides whether to accept the article as is, send it back to the author for revision, or reject it outright.
• Reviewing helps uphold scientific standards, but it adds to the delay between research and publication—often a year between submission and publication.

Technical Reports

• Technical reports are an outgrowth of government-funded research.
• In return for funding, the government expects regular progress reports.
• These reports are published through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) to give the public access to funded research.

Why use technical reports?

• They often have information before it appears in journal form—but they’re not peer-reviewed.
• Sometimes they contain data which appears nowhere else.

Accessing Technical Report Data

• NTIS indexes their own technical reports—index available on CD-ROM (1983-pres.); online (1969-pres.); fiche (1964-present) and in print.
• Some agencies are putting up technical report indexes, or even the reports themselves on the Web
  • NASA Technical Reports Server at http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS
  • DOE Reports Bibliographic Database at http://www.doe.gov/dra/dra.html
• Chemical Abstracts indexes technical reports…based on the NTIS indexes, so the indexing is more detailed for chemicals than the original NTIS indexing, but more lag time and the indexing is less detailed than CA give to journals.
• Technical reports are identified by report number, e.g. AD-A 211653, or DE90-006464. Some reports have more than one report number assigned. The user may have to check the NTIS indexes to verify the report number.
• Reports are available at Government Depository libraries across the country.

Conference Papers

• Papers presented at a conference are often the fastest way of publishing hot new information.
• But conference papers are often hard to locate in print; indexing can be slow, and they are not refereed in most cases.

Accessing Conference Papers

• Chemical Abstracts indexes conference papers in chemistry. Other indexes are specially devoted to conferences.
• Papers may be published as part of a journal, as a special monograph, or as part of a monographic series. Conference proceedings can be difficult to locate in an online catalog. If your catalog allows keyword searching, use significant words from the information ON THE CONFERENCE (conference editors, location of the conference)

Dissertations

• Dissertations and theses are a major form of academic publication.
• They often contain information, especially experimental detail, not reported elsewhere, or reported much later.

Accessing Dissertation Information

• Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI, published by UMI) indexes most North American and many European dissertations.
• As with technical reports, Chemical Abstracts gets dissertation info from DAI and adds chemical indexing.
• Copies can often be obtained from University Microfilms (UMI) at http://www.umi.com/hp/Products/Dissertations.html, or by interlibrary loan.

Patents

• Patents are a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of inventions granted by a government in return for the publication of the details of the invention.
• Patents may be assigned by the inventor to another person or corporation. Example: all patents for work done at the University of California are assigned to the UC Regents.
• Patents are the most important form of publication for industrial research.
• For more information on patents in general see also: InfoSurf: Patent Resources on the Internet at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subj/patents.html.

Patents as information sources

Patents are:

• sources of legal information — who owns the right to manufacture a given invention in a given country.
• sources of business information — competitive intelligence — What companies are working in a given field? Who are the prime inventors or experts in a field?
• sources of technical information — they give the necessary information to replicate an invention.

What may be patented?

• Machines — includes means of production and consumer goods
• Manufactures — mainly consumer goods
• Designs — e.g. packaging, decoration
• Plants — agriculture, horticulture
• Processes — including chemical ones
• Compositions of matter — i.e. chemical substances

Requirements for patentability

• Novelty — The invention must be “new”; not existing in “prior art”.
• Unobviousness — The invention must not be obvious to an observer “skilled in the art”.
• Utility — The invention must be useful. You can’t patent a compound; only a use for a compound.

Disclosure of patent information

The patent application must contain:

• Explanation of the utility of the invention
• Enough detail so that someone “skilled in the art” could reproduce it
• Indication of the “best choice” if more than one alternative is described. (This frequently comes up in chemical and drug patents.)

Patents on the international level

• Patents are a government monopoly, so an inventor must apply in each country where such a monopoly is desired. Exception: European Patent Office allows application in multiple European countries at once. World International Property Organization (WIPO) streamlines application in multiple countries.
• Different countries have different rules on patentability and time of disclosure.
• Quick disclosure of unexamined patents (e.g. Japan) vs. disclosure of issued patents. (traditional U.S.)
• Patent laws are converging somewhat, due to the most recent General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)

Chemical Patents and Markush Structures

Chemical patents often have claims made for a whole family of compounds. These are called Markush claims, after the first inventor to successfully claim a generic structure. The inventor need not have tested or even prepared all members of the family—just make a chemically plausible claim of equivalence.

Accessing Patent Information

• Chemical Abstracts indexes patents with “new” chemical information, but only the first version received if the patent has been applied for in multiple countries. Fairly good detail on chemical information in patents.
• Special patent databases cover patents in other ways.
  • Several Web patent databases are available, with varying types of “added value” indexing, including:
    • The US Patent and Trademark Office has its own bibliographic database at http://patents.uspto.gov/.
    • IBM has a free Web site for US patents at http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html.
    • Questel/Orbit has a commercial site (QPAT) at http://www.questel.orbit.com/patents/welcome.html, with links to lots of patent information on the Web.
    • Chemical Abstracts Service has a commercial site (Chemical Patents Plus) at http://casweb.cas.org/chempatplus/ which adds CAS indexing to full-text chemical patents.
  • Derwent's World Patent Index collects all patents for the same invention into “patent families” and provides excellent indexing. For more information, see the Derwent web site at http://www.derwent.com.
  • IFI Plenum does value-added indexing of US patents.
  • Many patent databases exist for other specific patent offices — JAPIO, Chinapats, PATOSEP.
• The UCSB Library will order copies of patents for students, faculty and staff.

Electronic Publishing

Electronic publishing, through listservs, bulletin boards, electronic archives, and the World Wide Web, is of growing importance to the scientific community. Starting with tightly knit research areas, where the latest information is vital (e.g. particle physics), electronic publishing is spreading to all areas of science.

Types of Electronic Publication

• Bulletin boards (BBS)
  • Dial-up systems, often devoted to single topics.
  • One of the earliest forms of electronic networking.
• Listservs
  • Use e-mail to communicate.
  • Access by subscription.
  • May be moderated; usually informal exchange of information.
  • May receive individual messages, or digests of a given period of time.
  • Many maintain archives of old messages, sometimes Web accessible.
  • For an extensive list of chemistry-related listservs, see Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-conferences: Chemistry, Chemical Engineeering and Mechanical Engineering at http://www.n2h2.com/KOVACS/S0008s.html
• WWW (World Wide Web) [You're using it now!!]
  • Uses hypertext-linked documents
  • Developed at CERN; made popular by free NCSA Mosaic Web-browser software.
  • Allows transfer of text, graphics, audio, video…and more.
  • Currently the hottest medium for electronic publishing.

Issues in Electronic Publishing

• Full text vs. page image — More specifically, is plain ASCII text better than HTML-formatted text or page images such as Postscript files or Adobe Acrobat PDF files.
• Individual publication vs. journals — Anyone can put a publication up on the web these days; so is the “filtering” mechanism of the big, traditional refereed journal still necessary?
• Electronic equivalents of print journals (for example Journal of Biological Chemistry at http://www.jbc.org vs. pure electronic journals (such as Internet Journal of Chemistry at http://www.ijc.com) — Many traditional print journals are creating electronic editions, but some are trying to exploit the format to the fullest, with hypertext citations, integrated sound, animation and video, etc.

New Technology, New Problems

• Indexing — Chemical Abstracts and some other services now index e-journals, but not all e-sources get indexed.
• Citation — Standards for citing electronic publications are now coming out from various sources, but not everyone agrees.
• Archiving — Electronic sources tend to be transient; archives are only beginning to be created.

“The Invisible College”

• Networking between scientists in a given field can be extremely important.
• Exchange of preprints, especially electronically, is growing rapidly.
• Being active in scholarly societies (e.g. ACS) and communicating with your colleagues is vital to stay on top of your field!

This page created by Chuck Huber (huber@library.ucsb.edu) and modified by Carol Carr.

Grace Baysinger, Head Librarian and Bibliographer
Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, Stanford University Libraries
graceb@stanford.edu