Information Today
Volume 18, Issue 5 — May 2001
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CAS Releases STN Express Version 6.0, Expands Chemical Abstracts Coverage

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has announced the release of STN Express 6.0, which includes new tools for enhanced post-processing of search results. CAS has also announced that it will make its entire Chemical Abstracts (CA) collection—dating back to 1907—available through all of its electronic products.
 

STN Express 6.0
Among the options introduced in the new version of STN Express are the following tools for preparing reports and tables to present the information retrieved from STN International databases:

  • Table Tool—Helps users create a table of data, graphics, and chemical structures from STN answer sets for easy analysis of search results

  • Report Tool—Helps users create customized, easily readable reports from search results

  • Predefined Reports feature—Allows users to create reports with a professional-looking pre-defined format

  • RTF files with live hyperlinks—Allows users to follow links in their transcripts to the associated full-text documents on the Web
"Information professionals who have relied on STN Express for years like the way this new version 6.0 helps them deliver more value to their clients," said Robert L. Swann, CAS's director of research, information systems, and new-product development. "We created this new version of STN Express with substantial input from information professionals. One result is new tools that make it easy to create tabular reports and graphs of the search results. The reports not only look impressive but also help the ultimate users of the information to assimilate the data more quickly."
 

Chemical Abstracts
An additional 20 years of Chemical Abstracts' bibliographic and abstract information—dating back to 1947—will be available for search and display along with the most current literature and patent records in SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar, and STN. This first segment of the older records will provide access to over 2.2 million references to journal and patent literature from 1947 to 1966. The remaining CA bibliographic and abstract information—dating back to 1907—will be added over the next year, expanding the total online offering to nearly 20 million records—virtually the entire 20th century's research, searchable in a single file.

"Our vast, easily searchable electronic compendium is a unique resource for scientific research," said Matthew J. Toussant, CAS's editorial operations director. "We believe that digitizing this extensive time period of prior art will be recognized as a boon to scientific discovery as well as the patenting process."

Among the earlier documents covered by CA are findings relating to natural products and many other studies of renewed interest to today's chemical and pharmaceutical laboratories.

Source: Chemical Abstracts Service, Columbus, OH, 614/447-3847; http://www.cas.org.

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