Current Awareness, Reviews, and Document Delivery
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This session introduces another use of the A&I databases, current awareness. It also builds on our earlier acquaintance with reviews.
Contents |
Introduction
With the tremendous volume of primary chemical literature appearing each year, chemists need ways to become aware of new critical items they should be reading. The service that provides such assistance is called CURRENT AWARENESS. (These services are now often referred to as "alerting services.") Current awareness services automatically search on a frequent basis (usually weekly) the most recent entries in a database according to a search profile (strategy) that has been developed. For a broader look at less recent literature (perhaps one to two years old or older), REVIEW ARTICLES are often sought. These may cover hundreds of articles or other documents on the topic of the review. Finally, once the appropriate primary documents have been found, it may be necessary to use the services of a DOCUMENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, since it is likely that not all of the items needed will be found in the local library.
Current Awareness
Options from Major A&I Services
ISI's Current Contents series is a weekly series of current awareness bulletins. These have author and subject indexes, and entries appear in the printed Current Contents shortly after the appearance of a covered primary journal issue. One advantage of these table-of-contents services is that more journals are included in them than are found in most libraries. A disadvantage, however, is that there may be a few weeks delay between the appearance of the primary journal issue and its entry into the secondary Current Contents issue.
Current Contents comes in the following printed and electronic science editions, with approximately 1000-1600 journal titles covered in each:
- Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences
- Clinical Medicine
- Engineering, Computing & Technology
- Life Sciences
- Physical, Chemical, and Earth Sciences
- Social & Behavioral Sciences
It is also possible to subscribe to a Web version of Current Contents, Current Contents Connect. With such a product, an interest profile consisting of subject words, authors' names, etc., can be run against each weekly update. CC is also available as a printed weekly booklet, on diskettes, CD-ROMs, or as FTP files. The CD-ROM versions actually have a rolling one year's worth of data. Output can be sent as a library service via e-mail if profiles are run from a central library location.
The Current Contents database option has the capability to output the references in a format that will feed into personal database software, such as EndNote or ProCite. An added feature is the option of getting conference proceedings that are published as books. (Many conference proceedings are published as regular or special issues of primary journals and, hence, would already be covered in the basic CCOD.)
Chemical Abstracts Service has a Table-of-Contents feature in SciFinder or SciFinder Scholar. Much of the bibliographic information that enters the CAS database is now received from the publishers in electronic format. With electronic versions of primary articles now appearing weeks or even months before the printed counterparts, it is important to be able to list those articles in the database when they become available.
An example of current awareness output from the NLM PubMed database is shown below.
Internet Journal Table-of-Contents Lists
Many publishers and others now put lists of the tables of contents of journals on the Internet. These are usually free to the user. See the Indiana University Chemistry Library electronic journals list for some representative titles.
Elsevier's ScienceDirect is an example of a service offered by a major publisher that includes alerting services for their journals. The options include a search alert that lets you input author names, subject words, etc.; a volume/issue alert to discover when a new issue appears; and a citation alert that notifies you when an indicated article has been cited by someone in a newer article.
The American Chemical Society Publications Division offers a similar service for its 30+ journals, ASAP Alerts and Table of Contents Alerts. ASAP stands for "As Soon As Publishable," so when one of the articles enters the database, you are notified immediately via e-mail that includes a link to the article. The ACS Table of Contents Alerts is also an e-mail notification service, but it comes out only when the entire contents of a new issue is posted on the Web.
CA Selects/CA Selects Plus and Other Standard Interest Profiles
A STANDARD INTEREST PROFILE is a type of current awareness service that covers a topic of sufficiently general interest to make it profitable to spread the cost among a large number of subscribers to the printed product. The CA Selects/CA Selects Plus products are bi-weekly printed updates that contain the same abstracts found in the printed CA. American Chemical Society members who pay with their own funds receive a substantial discount. There are over 200 separate topics for which the CA Selects standard interest profiles are produced. CASelects Plus on the Web also has all of the topics available and offers many advantages over the printed counterparts, including a hyperlink to the new issue from e-mail notification and key-word searching of the issue.
Custom SDI Service
Custom interest profiles (SDI or SELECTIVE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION) can be constructed to produce frequent computerized updates from the Chemical Abstracts or other databases. Since SDI is tailored to individual interests, the cost is high compared to other options. A profile can be constructed on most databases on search vendors' systems (for example, STN) with automatic updates sent to an e-mail address, if desired.
- CAPlus and Other STN Files--The CAplus file on STN provides fast entry of articles into the CA database for key journals (about 1500 titles). The SDI feature of STN will allow you to set up a table-of-contents SDI profile for the CAplus file that can be sent as hardcopy, fax, or e-mail. It is even possible to establish profiles to be searched across multiple databases, including structure databases.
- STN's SMARTracker feature lets you search the Registry File for a structure or text query which can then be combined with an SDI search in other STN databases. Another SDI feature on the STN system removes duplicate records before sending you the results.
- Thomson Scientific's Discovery Agent--Profiles are run against the Current Contents Database in this Web-based SDI service. Users can create, manage, and edit their personal profiles on the Web. The Alerts are delivered weekly on the Web, but e-mail delivery or e-mail verification of the Web posting is also possible.
- Thomson Scientific's 's Personal Alert service pulls references from a number of the ISI databases, including Science Citation Index. It is even possible to include a relevant reference in the profile and discover what new articles have cited that reference.
- CAS's SciFinder "Keep Me Posted Now" Feature is not available to SciFinder Scholar users, but it provides an easy way for an industrial scientist to set up an alert.
A free SDI service is provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) through the US National Library of Medicine. The results below on isatin were received on 9/1/07:
- Entrez pubmed Results
Items 1 - 3 of 3
1: Hirayama K, Aoki S, Nishikawa K, Matsumoto T, Wada K. Identification of novel chemical inhibitors for ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase-L3 by virtual screening. Bioorg Med Chem. 2007 Aug 19; [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 17761421 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
2: Xu H, Wang D, Zhang W, Zhu W, Yamamoto K, Jin L. Determination of isatin and monoamine neurotransmitters in rat brain with liquid chromatography using palladium hexacyanoferrate modified electrode. Anal Chim Acta. 2006 Sep 8;577(2):207-13. Epub 2006 Jun 27. PMID: 17723673 [PubMed]
3: Diculescu VC, Kumbhat S, Oliveira-Brett AM. Electrochemical behaviour of isatin at a glassy carbon electrode. Anal Chim Acta. 2006 Aug 11;575(2):190-7. Epub 2006 Jun 3. PMID: 17723590 [PubMed]
RSS Feeds
Many primary journal publishers are now offering the option of establishing an RSS feed to their products. This allows you to stay up to date with websites that provide RSS feeds for their content. An RSS reader, also known as an RSS aggregator, collects all the information from the RSS feeds to which you subscribe, allowing you to browse all of this content without having to visit each website.
Reviews
All of the sources in the previous section are aimed at making you aware of the existence of new primary literature as soon as possible after its publication. Sometimes, particularly at the start of a large research project, it is desirable to take a broader look at a subject, perhaps in one- or two-year periods of time. REVIEW articles (or chapters) are written by experts in a field to make it easy to survey a large body of literature on a topic. The reviewers sift out the best literature, write a brief summary of the significant findings of the works, and give full bibliograpic references to the primary works. Thus, in a large field, a secondary review article may include hundreds of references in a single review article.
Review articles are sometimes published as special articles in primary journals, sometimes in conference proceedings. Most reviews are published in serial works that look like books, but often have titles that are clues to the review nature of their contents, for example, Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products or Annual Review of Biochemistry. (The publisher Annual Reviews has many titles of interest to chemists, and each of their review serials is available online back to volume 1.) Reviews may also be published in journals whose purpose is to publish reviews, such as Chemical Reviews, a publication of the American Chemical Society, or Mass Spectrometry Reviews.
On SciFinder Scholar, one of the refine options allows you to select the document type "review". Each article that the author considers a review is so indexed in the CAPlus database. Likewise, in the Web of Science, one can limit the output to review articles.
A new concept in providing reviews seeks to cut down the time lag between the appearance of the new primary literature and its inclusion in a review. It is the Faculty of 1000 service. It is a literature awareness tool that highlights and reviews the most interesting papers published in the biological sciences, based on the recommendations of a faculty of well over 1000 selected leading researchers. These scientists provide a consensus map of the important papers and trends across biology and the life sciences.
The Index to Scientific Reviews, produced by the same company that publishes the Science Citation Index and Current Contents, has covered reviews since the early 1970s. A good source of reviews in organic chemistry is the series of treatises published by Pergamon Press (now Elsevier Science). For example, Comprehensive Organometallic Chemistry includes in v. 9 of the work an "Index of Review Articles and Specialist Texts on Organometallic Chemistry." For other leads to reviews, see "Finding Review Articles in Chemistry."
Document Delivery
DOCUMENT DELIVERY is a term used in libraries to refer to the process of acquiring a copy of an item which your home library does not own and does not intend to buy the original document. Thus, it could mean INTERLIBRARY LOAN, the process whereby copies of books are borrowed through your library from other libraries or copies of articles are obtained from them. It more and more refers to the purchase of individual copies of the items to be given to the end user (perhaps at no charge or only a partial charge to the end user).
As electronic journals become widely available, the boundaries between secondary abstracting and indexing services and the primary journals are obscured. For example, in 1998, the STN ChemPort service began to provide access to full-text journals of key scientific publishers through STN Easy, STN Express, STN on the Web, SciFinder, and SciFinder Scholar. There are direct links from search results in CAplus, MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS, INSPEC, and other secondary scientific databases to the corresponding electronic full texts of primary journal articles and other documents at the publishers' sites. Some of the publishers offer access to single articles on a per-article sales basis.
There are now hyperlinks from the citations in the original articles of some journals to CAplus records. Conversely, CAS has started to add citations to the CAPlus records, thus allowing links among the CA records in the database, and from there through ChemPort to the original literature. Since the American Chemical Society and some other publishers have put all of the articles in their journals on the Web, this provides an attractive link to most of the significant chemical primary literature.
Publishers are always concerned about violations of their copyright on the articles in their journals. Developments in document delivery that libraries have pioneered under the Fair Use clause of the current Copyright Act have always been viewed with mistrust by publishers. The electronic age has served to widen the divide between librarians and publishers, since the latter now seek to license content to libraries rather than to sell it outright.
Link to Internet Sources for Current Awareness, Reviews, and Document Delivery
This wiki page was originally created by Gary Wiggins. If you have a legitimate desire to contribute to its contents, please request an account from the sysop, Dr. David J. Wild, by e-mailing him at djwild @ indiana.edu
