PHSC 300 - Scientific Literature


Assignment 13


Your last two asignments before your final assignment are about the resources available throughn the McNeese Library. The newest resource is SciFinder Scholar. Next week's assignment will deal with other resources available through the library. Scifinder Scholar is a search engine tool from the American Chemical Society that searches several databases as well as the Chimical Abstracts database. Sciefinder Scholar allows several different search options. The easiest to use are the "Research Topic" and "Author" categories. Scifinder also allows browsing of the Tables of Contents of many journals. Additionally, you can draw a structure or reaction in the "Chemical Substance or Reaction" window and do a search. This is especially advantageous if you know the structure but have trouble figuring out the correct name. The search engine contained within SciFinder is very powerful, but it does take some skill to choose which search results are pertinent to your specific search. McNeese has only one "seat" to SciFinder, which means that only one person at a time may be logged on from McNeese. If you are unable to log on, that means someone else is currently using SciFinder(or the inernet connection is down for some reason). SciFinder may only be accessesd from on campus. Please do your searches as effcitiently as possible and get off SciFinder as quick as possible so others may use the system. SciFinder is installed on computers at the library and in all but one computer in the Chemistry Computer Lab (the one which will not connect to the network or the internet).

Assigned Problems:

  1. Search for the term 1,5-dimethyl-1,5-diazacylcooctane in Reserach Topic. Print out and return all the hits obtained.

  2. Search for the terms "poly(methylaluminoxane) cocatalyst." How many hits containing those concepts together are obtained?

  3. Search in the Author Name search for Ron W. Darbeau. How many hits are obtained? What is the most recent hit and its date?

  4. Use the chemical structure drawing option under "Chemical Structure or Reaction" to draw the compound below:



    This compound is !,5-dimethyl-1,5-diazacylooctane. Compare your results from the drawing to your search results from 1. Are there any differences?

  5. Search for the term "halatopolymer" in Research Topic. Print out all the results obtained.

  6. Use the Browse Table of Contents option. What is the first article and who are the authors in the latest published part of Inorganic Chemistry What is the last article and who are the authors in the latest published part of Chemistry of Materials?

  7. Using the Company Name/Organization search option, search for McNeese State University. Return the referecnces of the first three entries (i.e titles, jounals, pages, authors, dates, etc.).