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RSS feedsCAS, the scientific, technical and medical (STM) database arm of the American Chemical Society, has launched a major overhaul of its SciFinder service. Four new tools for searching the database have been introduced, including the ability to "browse" similar chemical substances.
The highlight of the SciFinder upgrade is a new Similarity Searching tool, which uses the Tanimoto algorithm to find similar chemical substances to those that an end user is searching for. Similarity Searching crawls the entire CAS Registry database of 26 million organic and inorganic substances and adds these to results sets.
CAS claim Similarity Searching will 'foster new ideas in drug discovery' as it provides the random browsing nature of using a traditional library to database usage.
CAS has also improved the abilities of SciFinder to search for chemical reactions and chemical structures. The Structure Query Tool has been re-developed to improve it's precision, whilst the Reaction Searching has new content concerning reaction conditions, intermediate reactions, multi-step reactions and retro-synthetic pathways.
As well as upgrading the search abilities of SciFinder CAS has taken time to improve the navigation and usability of the service, including reducing the amount of duplication when searching the CAplus and Medline databases and adding a Locate feature for bibliographic searches by journal title and author name.
SciFinder is now 10 years old, the site was launched in 1995. A Mac OS X version of SciFinder will be launched in the last quarter of 2005.
