American Chemical Society

Today I looked at the American Chemical Society Database. The database is a collection of cited and peer reviewed journals that have to do with chemical and other related sciences. The American Chemical Society publishes more than 35 journals that are made available through this database. Some topics covered by the journals are agriculture, nanoscience, toxicology, energy and fuels, and many more. Operating the database is fairly simple. There is a search bar in the top right hand corner where users can type in a topic, citation, or digital object identifier (a number assigned to electronic documents that does not change for the life of the document). I typed in Nanoscience. 5323 sources were returned to me. 81 of the were from chapters in actual books, the rest were articles made available by the database. There is a sidebar where users can limit there search by choosing different publications that offer information on the topic, or author, or publication date, or manuscript type. Once I found an article I wanted to read I hit the full text option and the article was brought up. There are many extra options on the article page. Users can make a permalink to the article, email to a colleague, order prints, and many other things. There is also a folder system that patrons can utilize by adding the document to "favorites". At the bottom of an article page the database includes reference citations used by the author. This could really come in handy for some one writing a research paper needing more than one source. The article page also had a history section that gives background information on the article such as publication date, author, and the journal the article was written for. There are links to similar articles and a list of publications written by that specific author on the page as well. I like this database because it is clean and easy to use. I may not know the terminology but it provides an easy and effective way for me to find out.