Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Teaching Students of Organic Chemistry How to Find Information on Chemical Substances

For the first time in all my years at NJIT I taught students of organic chemistry how to use information resources.  I am really going boing to my roots in getting into the profession of science librarianship.  When I worked as a laboratory chemist I used the printed Chemical Abstracts to look up preparations of target molecules.  I didn’t use online databases until I worked as an information scientist in the pharmaceutical industry in 1979.  Obviously, information technology has changed quite a bit since then.

The professor only allowed me 40 minutes to do my lecture.  The students were instructed to look at my Libguide in chemistry and chemical engineering (http://researchguides.njit.edu/chemistry) before the class.  I did not use my standard powerpoint, but suggested that the students view it after my lecture.  I started out by covering the nature of a scientific journal and the peer review process.  The students will be assigned a molecule and be required to find an article on either preparation or isolation from a natural source.  They must also find an article on general properties and one on biological properties.

With that thought in mind, I brought the Merck Index and had students pick out two substances at random that I would use for demonstration purposes.  I demonstrated:

  • Scifinder
  • Scopus
  • Pubchem
  • Chemspider
  • Wikipedia


I showed them how to find information on those substances from those 5 sources.  At the end of the lecture there were no questions.  I hope I succeeded.