PHSC 300 SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

Assignment 9: ACS Online Journals


Many scientific journals now have the optiion of subscribing to them online, over the web. The advantages to this publishing technique are many: 1) lower cost of publishing, since no printing is involved, 2) faster publication time, 3) gives the subscriber a searchable database for title, author and/or subject. The savings is passed on to the subscriber (at least to some extent). The ACS (American Chemical Society) Online journal site is at http://pubs.acs.org . Essentially all ACS journals are now available online. The ACS Online Jounrals became a reality in 1996. There is an options known as the Legacy Archives, which may contain articles of interest from article published prior to the advent of electronic publishing. Fair warning, however, the date restriction option does not seem to work with the Legacy Archives.

When at the initial page click on the blue tab "Advanced Article Search" at the upper top middle right of the page. On the next page, skip the gray "User Name and Password" and "Citation Find" dialog boxes (you won't need these for a free search) and go to the tan "Full Text Search" dialog box. You can now search via either author or words in the title, or words anywhere in the text, by entering either the author or the desired word from the title, or word anywhere in the text. Under the "Avanced Options" you can change from searching all ACS journals to specific ACS journals or to journals coveting specific titles plus specifying specific years. For our searches, we'll cover all the years available. You may retrieve title and authors of articles with their standard references for free that are current or for the past four years. To receive the article you must be either an online subscriber to that particular journal, or pay $25 for the article (via credit card over a secure connection). Full Abstracts of the articles are often available for free, to determine if you wish to purchase the article. For example: to search for a particular author, you would enter the authors name in the "Author" section. If you wanted just articles with a specific compound in the title, you would enter the compound in the "Title" section. If you wanted articles by a specific author about a specific compound you would make entries in both the "Author" and Title" sections. When you make entries in both the "Author" and "Title" sections there is a choice of "And", "Or", and "Not" to help you streamline your searches. The articles are available in either HTML format or in pdf (portable document format) format. The advantage of pdf format is that the article can be read by a pdf reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader and printed from the program to appear identically as if printed in the paper edition journal. Adobe has Acrobat Readers for the pdf format for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms, all available for free.

Problems:

  1. Search all ACS Online journals for "azetidine" in the title. Return a standard reference including title (author, title, journal, volume, page and year) for the first five articles.

  2. Search all ACS Online journals for "aziridine" in the title. Return the list of the first five articles, with a standard reference format.

  3. Return standard references for all articles in Macromolecules by Tobin J. Marks available by free search.

  4. Return standard references for the firstr ten articles in Chemistry of Materials by Andrew R. Barron.

  5. How many online articles has the late F. Albert Cotton had published in journals that are available through ACS Online?(search for Albert Cotton)

  6. How many online articles has Ron W. Darbeau had published in journals that are available through ACS Online? What journals has he published in?