CHEMICAL ABSTRACTS TUTORIAL

CA on CD covers the same types of materials as the print version of Chemical Abstracts. You can find citations to information from the following types of sources by accessing CA on CD.

• Books References to chapters or sections in books are prevalent in Chemical Abstracts. When searching for such references, it is necessary to search for the author or title of the section in question rather than the author or title of the book as a whole. There are some cases in which an entire book on a narrow subject is indexed. For any other citation from a book, the title and author (or editor) of the book appear as the source of the article of interest.
• Jounal Articles Most of the references you will need to find are references from journal articles. Again, search for the author or title of the article, not the title of the journal. The journal name will appear as the source of the article. Review articles, as well as journal articles from online and on-disk journals are indexed, and the type of article is specified.
• Conference Papers Papers from conferences dealng with chemistry-related topics are also indexed by Chemical Abstracts. In addition to the title and year of publication of the proceedings, the records for conference papers will give the name, date, and place of the conference at which the paper was presented.
• Patents Patents from many different nations are indexed in Chemical Abstracts. Among the more prevalent are United States, Japanese, British, German, and World patents.
• Patent Families A patent family is a group of patents for the same or similar inventions. Patents in patent families are assigned priority according to how closely related they are to the original patent searched.
• Dissertations Dissertations are indexed separately from other books, and are indexed in their entirity rather than by chapter.
• Reports Government and corporate technical reports (of the unclassified variety) are a good source of chemical information.