Discussion

Hello Chris,

Did you try doing the search by entering cyclovoltammetry of tetraphenyilporphyrin into the Search Reaxys box of Quick Search (the main landing page of Reaxys)? Reaxys recognizes cyclovoltammetry as a property and will pull Records of relevant Substances that contain cyclovoltammetry information. This will be the first hit set listed by Reaxys. Each record will show the Hit Data, which you can explore by expanding it. Look at the Hit Data in the first record. You will see that Cyclovoltammetry is one of the indexed terms in the Description subfield of the Property Field Electrochemical Characteristics. I suspect that when you say that you did a property search on voltammetry, you searched that term under the fields available in Query builder. Is that right? Try looking for Electrochemical. The field Electrochemical Characteristics will be one of the Properties you can select and drag into the Query builder workspace. There, select show fields and click on the Lookup icon of Description. Cyclovoltammetry is one of the terms you can search.

I hope that helps! Otherwise, please keep asking questions.
Anja

Vince,

Great questions and thanks for posting them!

To answer your last question first, perhaps you can have a look at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00601 which is a relatively recent article on the topic you raise. After I saw this publication Neelam and I had a number of discussions on the content of the paper and my quick summary is that she and her colleagues did a great job although there were a few things in some of the text that I worried about.

Can I compare the two? Well, yes, although I have not been involved with SciFinder since early 2013 and while I have kept up to date with news about SciFinder on various websites, I have not used it for almost 4 years. Nevertheless, my understanding is that the principles outlined in my last SciFinder book are still mostly valid. [Information Retrieval: SciFinder, 2nd Edition, Damon Ridley, ISBN: 978-0-470-71247-4.]

When would we want to use Reaxys, when would we want to use SciFinder? My first comment is that chemists and chemistry (very broadly defined, meaning going beyond traditional chemistry into fields such as biomedical, materials, environmental sciences and so forth) are extremely lucky to have two excellent information resources to tap into and in my opinion all universities with major science programs should have both. However, I know that funding and available time (to look through multiple systems) both are in short supply, so indeed scholars have to consider at one time or the other, which to use and when.

My second comment is that the products are continually being upgraded, not only in content but also in search, display and post-processing functionality. One consequence of continual upgrades is that any comparison needs to be kept up to date, and here I add that Reaxys made huge changes during 2013 and 2014 so any review of Reaxys before the end of 2014 is essentially not valid and in my opinion should be dismissed. Further, Reaxys introduced a super new interface in October 2016, and SciFinder has announced its new interface will be available soon.

In your comment you suggest both products seem “to be very similar”, and in the sense that both have document, substance and reaction records you are correct. Indeed it is the combination of these three types of records that clearly stand Reaxys and SciFinder apart from everything else (including web search interfaces such as Google/Google Scholar). However, there are substantial differences in the content, the organization, and the structure of data, and if you work through the document posted in the Reaxys Module in your course: Reaxys_PropertiesSearch_170117.docx, you see one major example.

To discuss such differences in more detail, however, is beyond the scope of any reply to a general question relating to comparison of the two products, but if you or others involved in the course would like further details, about specific areas, then please enter them in separate and new comments - and do it as quickly as possible since that will give us time not only for a more comprehensive discussion, but also to allow Anja and me to (possibly) create new teaching Reaxys Modules or even some (research-based) Special Projects for your course.

Damon

Greetings to OLCC Spring 2017!

I'm very much looking forward to learning more about cheminfomatics. The polish and ease of use of the reaxys tool was impressive! Uploading my export for assignment one....