ChemSpider Blog

As the number of spectra uploaded to ChemSpider increases (and it is now increasing at quite a rate) we have noticed that ther increased loading time associated with records with a large numbr of spectra can be very long, especially if the spectra are “heavy”, for example for C13 specra at high-frequency and with zero-filling. When there are a number of spectra there are even more challenges.

With this in mind we have introduced the ability to Load a Spectrum when the user wants to see the spectrum and not automatically on loading the page. An example is shown here for recently uploaded spectra from the Drexel University laboratory of Jean-Claude Bradley.

Please est it out and let us know if you see any issues. the example listed above has a “heavy C13″ spectrum so loading might take awhile.?/p>

Josh Wilson, the Reference Librarian at the Physical and Mathematical Sciences North Carolina State University Libraries posted a comment on CHMINF this week. He commented:

“Recently I conducted an orientation session for new graduate students in chemistry, and I gave them a survey to determine their familiarity with some common databases and research tasks.  I thought you might be interested in seeing the results.  (I do not present them as scientific, it was a small sample and I didn’t have time to painstakingly construct the questions.)  To spare you a page-long e-mail, check the results and some observations here:”

The document gives the following information:

“Question 1 was “Are you familiar with the following databases for finding chemistry information?”. Students answered on a scale from 1-4 (from not familiar to very familiar, so the closer the average to 4, the more it was universally known, the closer to 1, the least known).  Average scores for 25 respondents:

Wikipedia - 3.24
SciFinder Scholar - 2.76
ChemFinder - 2.44
Google Scholar - 2.36
Sigma-Aldrich - 2.36
Chemical Abstracts (printed) - 2.20
Web of Science - 1.84
PubChem - 1.52
Beilstein/Gmelin - 1.28
ChemSpider - 1.08
CrossFire Commander - 1.04”

Clearly we have work to do to improve awareness of ChemSpider for students (and I have already sent a note to Josh to see if I can provide an overview to students at NCSU some time in the future) but what is clear is how important Wikipedia is to students. This makes the curation work on Wikipedia all the more important!