~nstructionin Chemical Literature
-
A SYMPOSIUM
George Gorin Oklahoma State University, Sillwater. OK 74078 The main purpose of this article is to outline a formal course of instruction, designed to acquaint the students with the major sources of chemical information and with procedures for their efficient use. In addition, some consideration is given to the place that such a course has, or might have, in the chemistry curriculum. As we shall see. a course dealine with "chemical literature" is offered in a n u h e r of schools. But what these courses entail is not clear, because no well established pedagogical tradition exists in this field. Moreover, the majority of schools in the United States do not offer such a course. In the last thirty years, only a few hooks have been published in English that deal with this subiect. and thev differ widelv in their scope and content. Some hioks'are devoted largely or exclusivel~to the enumeration of the iournals, books, and other documents in which chemical information is stored (1,2).Other books deal more or less exteusivelv with the wavs in which chemical literature is utilized ( 3 , 4 j and, more specifically, with the process hy which information may he found1 ( 5 , 6 ) .But i t is fair to say that, with one exception, these books do not emphasize the performance of library exercises as a means of learning the subject. The exception is "Chemical Publications" by Mellon (8). In the preface to this book, the author states that "library problems are indispensable in introducing students to the literature," and the book contains a substantial number of exercises. However, this book has long been out of print, and so many changes have taken place since its publication that a considerable part of its contents is now out of date. The anoroach recommended in this article goes even further than .. Mellon's. It ii to make library exerrises the principal vehicle by whirh chemical literature. and other sources of information. are introduced to the students. This a ~ p r o a c his justified bv the fact that the primary aim of the course is to teach and develop a performkory skillhow to find, in the literature, the information one needs. T o arhieve surh a goal is notoriously more difficult than ro impan descriptive knowledge. Rut it is generally recognized that the most dffective way to acquire such performatory knowledge is practice, i.e., the student learns by doing and develops proficiency by doing more of the same. A manual of exercises that translates these principles into practice has been authored bv Dermer and Gorin (9).Some representative exercises, taken from that manual, are described and discussed in the next section.'l'he third part of the artirlr outlines a onesemester, two credit-hours course, which is based mainly on such exercises, while a separate section describes two additional exercises, of a different type. One need not look far afield for convincing demonstrations of the validity of this approach. A major of the conThis paper was presented in paltat the 178m ACS National Meeting. Washington. DC. In Septemoer 1979. and in pan at the 72nd Annual Conference. Special Llbraroes Associalton. Atlanra, GA, in August 1981. Referenceshould also be made to an audiovisual course, produced by the Depaltmenl of Educational Activities of the American Chemical Society, which is described in Ref. (7).
'
veutional curriculum for training chemists is devoted to laboratory courses. These are time consuming, expensive, and possibly not as effective as one might wish them to he; but no one has found an alternative. At any rate, no one imagines that students should learn to oerform chemical exneriments hv listening to lectures, or viewing "projectuals," or reading books that describe the apparatus which is used in doing the experiments. The course outlined in the next sections is patterned after lahoratorv courses:. onlv .the locale is differentthe library, instead octhe laboratory. Representative Exercises The general design of the exercises is as follows: To do the exercise, the student must physically take hold of the appropriate source. and use it to find the answers to s~ecificauesiions. These questions are designed to illustrate; and tohelp fix in the student's mind, the most important kinds of information that can typically be found in the source. Each exercise states a general problem, and is accompanied by a set of assignmen&, of which each student is expected to do one. Although it is desirable to have enough assimments so that each me&ber of a class can do a diffeient one, this is not essential. The questions and assignments must be formulated with some care. If they are too obvious, the students do not learn enoueh from them. But. on the other hand. the assienments shouid not require anything more t h a n t h e straigh~forward utilization of the source, and finding the answer should take no more than forty to sixty minutes-provided, of course, that the student is using the source correctly. The point is to give the students experience with a large number of sources, and the time spent on any one should, therefore, he limited. There is, however, one "trick," of which the students are dulv warned in advance. In each set of ten to fifteen assimmeits, they may expect to find one "blank" or "dummy"& sigument, to which no answer can in fact be found. This lends verisimilitude to the exercise, because in a "real-life" situation a person who goes to the literature seeking information does not have any assurance that the information is there to he found. Since the number of dummy questions is small, the student must not give up too easily. If he or she is not finding the answer, chances are that helshe is doing something wrong. But one should also learn when to ston lookine. If the answer is given as "not found," and that is not correct, the student is penalized in just the same way as for getting the wrong result on an "unknown" laboratory sample. The following example shows a representative exercise, that deals with the Index Guide to Chemical Abstracts, and aset of fifteen assimments. The students are instructed to answer concisely, and an exemplary set of answers is given as well. (Exercise 1)Index Guide B y meansof the Inder Guide find the index term for the assigned substance during the s~eeifiedtime ~eriodand the most recent ahl t lstert G d r fur stract t h a t rcferstuthat iulrctanre. . I ~ o ~ o n s uthe pertinent rhangei and rorrectionu. Report: t i \ ) Indexing wrm;(R, Registry Number of sul,stanvr; ~ C ' C:tatiun I id abstract: ~ D I Correction in latest Guide (if none, so state) and citation of source.
C.\S
Volume 59
Number 12 December 1982
991
Assignments: [For the period 1972-761 (1)Bourbonal; (2) Ambelline; (3) 8-Eleostearic acid; (4) Carhetamide; [For the period 1977date] ( 5 ) Chitose; (6)C. I. Food Yellow 6; (7) Gracilol-B; (8)Giherillin An; (9) Pediculidine; (10) Narhonolide; (11)Metanil Yellow; (12) Preparation 30036; (13) Schizandrolicacids; (14) Ursonic acid; (15) Austerlicine ("dummy" assignmrnt). Answers ltu asrignment ( I ) ] :( A ] Henzaldchyde. 3-ethoxy-l-hydruxv-; (HI 1121 -32-41: (CI CA 8ir20002Ab; ID) NIIcorrectron, CA The second example deals with "Beilsteins Handbuch der Organischen Chemie!' Knowledge of German is not a prerequisite for the course, but the students are given a special one-hour "crash course," which enables tbem to do the exercise without knowledge of the language. The assignments are given in German, and only five are shown below: (Exercise2) "Beilsteins Handbuch . . ."(Fourth Ed.) Locate the information about the assigned compound in this reference work. Report: (A) Name of compound in English; (B) Loeation in the Basic Series (Hauptwerk) or in the earliest Supplementary Series (Ergiinzungwerk)that lists the compound, with inclusive pages; (C) System Number (Systemnummer)of compound; (D) Location of information in latest Supplementary Series. Assignments: (1) Isatin; (2) Methionin (I-);(3) Cholin; (4) Arachidonskure; (5) Chlorseetylen. The last two examples are self-explanatory, and only two assignments are given for each: (Exercise3) Science Citation Index (SCIXA) Find the assigned article in the source index of SCIXA and the desired information abaut the article in subsequent volumes of SCIXA*as specified. Report: (A) Author(s) besides one named in assignment (if none, so state) and title of article; (B) First citing article in volume of SCIXA two years after that of publication; (C) Fint citing article in latest available issue of SCIXA (if none, so state) and citation of source. Assignements: (1)J. A. Barker, Molee. Phys. 73; (2) B. R. Busi, Current Sci. 73. (Exercise 4) U.S. Gouernment Documents Find the document on the assigned subject, published within the specified time period, in the Monthly Catalogue of Gouernment Publications. Report: (A) Author and date of publication; (B) Government Agency that issued document: (C) Supt. Docs. Class No. and price (if not given, so state); (D)Citation of source. Use Collective Index] (1)Extent Assignments: For period 1-71; of acid mine pollution in the United States affecting fish and wildlife; (2) Total hexane and ethanol extractives of tobacco. In order to evaluate the students' performance in the exercises, it is of course desirable to have a "key" with the correct answers. However, to make up and maintain such a key requires considerable effort; the entire course comprises more than fortv exercises, that contain, on average, four questions each, so that the key for fifteen different a&gnmeks would have more than 2400 answers. A reasonable compromise, for classes with more than ten to fifteen students, is double up on the assignments. This has proved satisfactory, in the writer's experience, which has been with classes of twenty to thirty students. Deslgn of Course T h e course is comprised of about forty exercises like the ones described in the ~recedinesection. Thev are assigned a t the rate of 3 or 4 per week for eleven weeks. has been'stated, the exercises and assienments are chosen so that it should be possible to work out
