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SciFinder-n Database Guide: What's New

What happened to SciFinder?

SciFinder-n is the next generation of SciFinder. It has everything the old version had with a cleaner interface, mobile accessibility, and some helpful new tools outlined below.

Here's What's Different

The table below was created by Drew University Librarians to outline the changes from SciFinder to SciFinder-n.

SciFinder-n is a new version of SciFinder-web (nee SciFinder). The table below provides a brief comparison of both tools.

Feature SciFinder-web (SFw) vs SciFinder n (SFn)

Core databases

Same. But loading of new datasets will only happen to SFn. An example of this is the recent (2019) addition of >300.000 H1NMR spectra from Enamine and more than 28,000 UV/Vis Absorption spectra from BIORAD
Interface Different.
Search algorithm Different - SFw used indexed terms to find results. SFn uses indexed terms, but also uses the Title, Abstract, Keywords to find documents that are referring to the query entered, that might have been missed in SFw. SFn retrieves a lot more results, however the relevancy should place higher importance on those documents that have more hits as well as hits on Concepts and Substances.
Added features in SFn Touchpad friendly (works great on a smartphone or iPad), multiple windows support, improved structure rendering, interactive filtering, incredible speed, recall of your entire search history, type-along-suggestions and removal of system limits. See more in SciFinderⁿ Training | CAS.
Ability to remove duplicates Still under development for SFn
Added tools in SFn

PatentPak, MethodsNow Synthesis, and Retrosynthesis planning come embedded in SFn.

PatentPak is a collection of patent documents from 31 organizations in a cleaned, layered and converted PDF format. It's "Viewer” or the mark-ups can link directly into the location of the chemistry (both, intermediates and starting materials) in each patent.

MethodsNow Synthesis is a collection of synthetic protocols from many important publishers going back to 2000. It can be accessed by searching for reactions and filter on Experimental Protocols. The protocols are in bullet points stepwise and contain information about scale, purity and validation data (if provided). Reactants and other compounds are all hyperlinked to extra information.

Retrosynthesis planning is a computer-aided synthetic design tool that helps generating and organizing synthetic routes for a given molecule. It works on known and previously prepared synthetic targets. The retrosynthetic tool will generate and display reaction pathways generated from single step reactions published in the literature. These results will potentially include reaction pathways generated from multiple literature sources thus creating new and novel synthetic pathways previously unavailable in the literature.

Read more about SciFinder-n at https://www.cas.org/solutions/cas-scifinder-discovery-platform/cas-scifinder

Stay up to date!

For the newest updates to SciFinder-n from CAS check out their website: https://www.cas.org/solutions/cas-scifinder-discovery-platform/cas-scifinder

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