DIALOG@ in the Classroom Paul L. Gaus,' C. L. Borders, Jr., D. L. Powell, a n d Dale Surbey The College of Wooster. Wooster. OH 44691 a set of oractice nroblems for students to train on usine the inexpensive (in terms of computer time) ONTAP' files of the DIALOG system. In this paper, we outline the teaching methods of the course and present a set of practice questions, with answers. in the h o ~ that e other schools will he able to make use of the questions and answer sets. One of the most important things we have learned from teaching DIALOG is that the students need to begin with a fairly good working understanding of the organization of Chemical Abstracts. Fur this reason we always require that the students complete a successful manual search of printed Chemical Abstracts hefore learning DIALOG. We do this by having the students write two review papers on selected topics in inorganic chemistry. For the first paper, the literature search is performed entirely by hand, with particular emphasis on the use of CA Collective Indexes and the CA Index Guide.
Students a t The College of Wooster are required to comnlete both a senior-level (two quarter) independent study research prujwt a i well as a junior-level (mequarter) course in lihr;~r?methods. In tht. Chemistry I)epartrnrnt, this junior-lvrel rrlurse (Inrnduction t~ Indel~enrlentStudy1 is fo(:u.;td in the arra grf morganir rhemi;tr\. hut is ostrnsildy a course in lil~raryresearch mt,thnd> Ammg other thinyi, the students nrc tnught how 1'1 lwrform manual *arches uslni: the a r i n t t d wrsion d ( ' h~ ~ m~~ r tn\ ll ~ ~ r r a r rHeeinnine a. in 19-6, we r - ~ - ~ - - - - r~ have also been heavily involved in teaching stulents how to perform literature searches using the on-line literature retrieval methods of the Lockheed DIALOGasystem. Since then we have trained an average of 35 students each year and have developed not only the teaching methods to do this, hut also Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Table 1. Practlce Questionsfor Flle 204 (DIALOG'SONTAP CA SEARCH Flle) Retrieval' Beginning Level
1)
Tonic
orma mat 11
~~~i~
Metallocenes such as ferrocene and cobaitocene
lnlennediate Level 1) Substilutim reactions of cobaltmine compounds 2)
Outer sphere electron transfer reactions 3) Crown (or poly-)ether compounds 2)
3) Photosubstitution reactions of iron compounds
4)
4)
Cobaltcontaining models of hemglobin
Sub~titutionreactions of platinum compounds
Vitamin 812 Advanced Level 1) Binuclear complexes of ruthenium
2)
5)
Cobalt analysis or determination of % cobalt
3) Metal-metal bonds involving chranium, manganese, molvbdenum. or rhenium 4)
6) Boron trichloride,BCla
(CAS Registry Number available in File 231) ~
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Chemical Abslracls accession numbers lor papers relating to each search topic.
1048
Journal of Chemical Education
Photos~b~titution reactions of metal earbonyis
The 0x0 process
Retrieval' (Format 1)
For the second review paper, the students use hoth the printed form of Chemical Abstracts and the computer-hased DIAT.OG We find that the com~uter-hasedliterature -- svstem. -" search experience reinforces the student's understanding of Chpmical Abstracts. This is esneciallv true in the case of the on-line thesaurus in ~ 1 ~ ~ 0 G , b h i cthe h i equivalent s of the CA Index Guide in printed form. In addition to giving the students a better understanding of Chemical Abstracts. DIALOG training also saves time in the subsequent literature searches. W e a r e careful to emohasize that DIALOG searches of Chemical Abstracts are not automatic and require careful preparation and even some suonlemental work in the printed form. Still, it becomes oh-
even minutes) instead of days. Another benefit of the DIALOG system is the availability
intellectually confined by the limitations of a particular library. We have employed a number of teaching methods, including handouts, lectures, practice sessions a t the computer terminal, and the problem sets that are descrihed below. All of t,hese methods are helnful. hut nerhans the most effective let them learn by experience. The hook "Guide to Dialog Searching" (which is available through DIALOG) has also been especially useful. The students typically acquire a working understanding of DIALOG after two or three lectures plus an hour or so of on-line practice. At this point we help the students design the final search strategy for their topics. As a part of the process of learning DIALOG, we ask the students to work on some example search problems. This work is done in File 204, the inexpensive practice file called ONTAP CA SEARCH. This is a closed file, the contents of which will not change. We have prepared answer sets for these practice questions. The answers represent our best solutions to the search questions, and have been checked by two independent experts in the field. The answers are printed in format one, which for DIALOG is simply the Chemical Abstracts accession number fnr any journal article. The students are able to compare their retrieval with the answer set to see how well they have done in devising a search for the topic. We have list,ed tonics answer sets for File 204 in Tahle ~ ~these - search ~ ~and ~ 1below. Also, in Tahle 2 we have prepared a similar answer set for search auestions for File 231. ONTAP CHEMNAME. This file is theLclused,practice version of the CHEMNAME file where one obtains CAS Reeistrv Numbers for specific chemical substances. Once t h e s i Registry ~ ~ ~ ~ u m h k r are s known., thev can be used as search terms in the DIALOG file for Chemical Abstracts. We have found that students can reasonahly be expected, in our one quarter course, to learn to use most of the major search commands of the DIALOG language. This would include the commands BEGIN, SELECT, SELECT STEPS, COMBINE, TYPE, PRINT, LOGOFF, LOGOFFHOLD, END/SAVE, EXECUTE, and LIMIT. Also, students seem to catch on quickly to the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, the concept of truncation, as well as most common prefixes such as AU=, CS=, J N = , PY=, and LA=. Some search capabilities have seemed unnecessary a t this level, ~~~~~~
~~
-
T a b l e 2. Practice Questions for File 231 (DIALOG'S O N T A P C H E M N A M E File) CAS Registry NO."
Begmning Level 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6)
Rannoxon iodine monochloride
SF, Chinese white Ferrocene Terpyridine complex of cobalt Inferd;sIeLevel 1) Dioxygen, O2 2) Nitrogen chloride. NJCI 3) Nitrogen chloride. NC13 4) Sulfinyl chloride. SOCln 5) Boron lrichloride 6) Dimethylglyoxime complex of iron 7) Wolfram hexachloride 8) Phenanlhroline complex of cobaltlil) Advanced Level 1) Diethyl zinc 2) Hexachlwo phosphate salt of dichlwodiphenyl phosphorus ( I + ) 3) Bis(triphenylph0sphine)-coball(l1)bromide 4) Methylcyclopentadienylcarbonyl of manganese 5) Cis-isomer of dipyridinedichloroplatinumlll) 61 Cisdi~hlor~2.2'-biowidine derivative of ruthenium he- are compounds 1.z which me s m m are asked to *&in regisw n v m b ~ s w~ng File 231 of the DIALOG system. 'These are the actual reglrtry numbers olthe compounds, as found in File 231
especially refinements of LIMIT and use of suffixes. One of the most successful features of DIALOG with our students has been the use of full text operators to search for common phrases and word combinations in titles and index entries of papers. This forces the students to deal with the issue of controlled vocabulary in subject index searches and helps them to see the futility of a search of Chemical Abstracts subject indexes using an improper list of subject terms. If anything, DIALOG has given our students a hetter appreciation for the CA Index Guide. The search topics listed in Tahle 1 are somewhat artificial. Most researchers would have a more detailed search request than that shown by the brief titles we have given. We have tried to make the answer sets as inclusive as possible without unnecessarily broadening the retrieval. Those papers which are missed by the students (or those found by the student, hut not included in the answer set) can be typed out in format five. This is very important, because students can learn a lot by analyzing why these articles were missed (or mistakenly included). One problem that has been difficult to avoid concerns the dilemma of precision versus recall. Some students are unwilline to focus a search tiehtlv .. . enough to limit the recall to a reasonable numher. This leads to very expensive searches. Other students. in an effort to devise too precise a search, tend to limit unnecessarily the search strategy, thus missing important articles. Careful work with the practice sets descrihed here helps to give students enough experience to make this judgement more professionally. Acknowledgment The principal author wishes to thank the National Science Foundation program for Local Course Improvement (LOCI Grant Nu. 80-00828) for support of this work. We also thank Dr. Arthur Antony of the Chevron Research Company and Dana L. Roth of the California Institute of Technology, Sciences Library for reviewing the answer sets.
Volume 60 Number 12 December 1983
1049
