Chemistry

Finding Chemistry Information Quickly and Easily

• Books – use the UNT Library Catalog. Search by keyword but keep it broad. Can use “author and title” search when you know a title word or two and the author. Searches books, names of journals, and media (music, DVDs, etc.) but not journal articles
• Journal Articles. Best to use SciFinder Scholar (see below). If there isn’t a link to the journal or the article from SciFinder, then use the UNT Library Catalog. Why the UNT Library Catalog? Because it is more than 95% accurate in telling you what we have available. The database are maybe 60% accurate, the E-journal options on the Electronic Resources page maybe 75% accurate, so the catalog is best. Use the “Journal Title” search tab and type in the complete name of the journal – abbreviations are usually not searchable.
• Electronic Resources (a way of lumping all journal article databases and other online things together). Using the “browse by category”, you can search for e-newspapers, e-encyclopedias (and there are several good chemistry ones) and more.
• SciFinder Scholar – the absolute best journal article database to find articles that are on chemistry or chemistry-related information. There are only 3 connections so it gets busy in the afternoons. If this becomes a burden, let me know.
• Web of Science. Good alternative database if SciFinder Scholar is busy or not working. Covers significantly fewer journals but includes those that are supposed to be “the best of the best”. Also use for citation searching – when you have an article you want to follow and see who has cited it (included it in their bibliography) or you have an author that you want to see all papers they’ve published (remember that this is a pretty exclusive database though so you’ve missing a lot of the literature). If you create an account with Web of Science, you can set up search alerts (e-mails of articles matching your search terms), table of contents alerts, and citation alerts (when papers you select are cited, you will be notified)
• Science Direct. Although best used to provide journal articles, you can also use it to search for journal articles when SciFinder is busy. It has a lot of journals but not all so SciFinder is still best. By setting up an account, you can set search term alerts, tables of contents alerts, and citation alerts.

Thanks for listening. I hope this helps makes your time at UNT a fun and productive adventure.

 Beth

 (Beth.Thomsett-Scott@unt.edu)

beththomsettscott @ meebo