ChemSpider Blog

I have blogged previously about ChEBI entities of the month and our work to include the information to ChemSpider. In order to do so we had to introduce rich text support. This work is done and reported here. As of today nearly all ChEBI Entity of the Month information is now posted to ChemSpider. During the processs we have provided feedback to the team about some suggested changes to some structure depictions and have also noted some differences in stereochemistry between our reference structures and those on ChEBI. This type of interaction has us all be very vigilant about accuracy and it was great (and fast) to work with the group at ChEBI to cross-validate the limited dataset. Everyone gains.

The Rich text editor worked perfectly and without failure and is ready to roll out to the general public we think but we would still like some beta-testers to help test it please.

Some of you may remember that in OCtober of 2007 we are asked to de-index RSC articles which had originally been indexed by the ChemRefer service before we merged the two entities. If you don’t it’s described in detail over on the Open Chemistry Web blogsite. It was really all a misunderstanding based on robots.txt file and communication but, following a really pleasant coffee conversation at the Spring ACS meeting in New Orleans we received permission to re-index the site and received some excellent suggestions as to how to make it better. Here we are again with the RSC Free Access journal articles re-indexed and available for searching via the Literature Search capabilities.

I blogged previously about the results of searching Taxol and paclitaxel about after two additional Open Access journals. I list below the improvement in retrieval of information with and without the RSC indexed

Searching on paclitaxel without RSC gives a total of 745 articles.

Searching on Taxol without RSC gives a total of 1192 articles.

Searching on paclitaxel with RSC gives a total of 818 articles.

Searching on Taxol with RSC gives a total of 1207 articles.

Compare this to Google Scholar searches:

Searching on paclitaxel with Google Scholar gives 262,000 hits

Searching on Taxol with Google Scholar gives 135,000 hits

The numbers are certainly different. Is the quality? I’ll be working on some quality comparisons in time for my talk at the ACS meeting in Philadelphia….