Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Scifinder vexation

chemrox - 13-12-2012 at 16:45

While I have the use of Scifinder I'd like to use it with some degree of efficiency. What's bugging me is this; if I ask for how to make something simple I use the syntax: " synthesis of somedione"

what I get are many tens to many thousands of hits all closely associating "synthesis" and "somedione"

The articles are mostly about using somedione in a synthesis. This makes sense. So how should I adjust the syntax to focus on making somedione as apposed to using my compound in a preparation?

GreenD - 13-12-2012 at 16:57

you can, in some search engines, wrap test with quotation marks to emphasize a specific fragment, i.e.;

"Synthesis of Somedione"
will only return this fragment, in this specific order.
where
Synthesis of somedione will return anything with synthesis+somedione in the term...

not sure if scifinder has this capability though.

chemrox - 13-12-2012 at 21:09

I'll let you know..

Sunil Sharma - 20-1-2013 at 09:32

Go by structure search..

Mumbles - 22-1-2013 at 20:14

Agreed with the last poster. If it's something more common, it's by far easiest to search by the CAS number, otherwise searching by number of references is generally most useful for me. You can look up all reactions of said compound and sort by ones where it is a product. This works probably 80% of the time. The reaction indexing is not complete though, particularly when it comes to older journals. Sometimes you'll have to go to a paper where they use it as a reagent, and look in the experimental considerations to see where they obtained it or how they prepared it. Certain very common things can actually be the hardest to find how to make on a lab scale actually. I've run into this problem where I only need a small quantity of something as a reference or as an authentic sample but it is only available commercially in large quantities.

Lambda-Eyde - 23-1-2013 at 12:43

IIRC there's a bunch of boxes you can check before searching - one of them is something like "preparatory procedure".