Identification of environmentally relevant chemicals in bibliographic databases: a comparative analysis

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Information Science
• Chemistry

Background:

• Accurate chemical information is vital for industry and regulatory bodies.
• Incomplete bibliographic analysis occurs due to substance identification data in major chemical databases.
• Challenges exist in retrieving comprehensive data on chemicals across different platforms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the retrieval performance of four major chemical databases: SciFinder, Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar.
• To assess the completeness of bibliographic records for environmentally important chemicals.
• To identify challenges in chemical data storage and retrieval for comparative analysis.

Main Methods:

• Selected environmentally important chemicals as the study's focus.
• Conducted substance retrieval in SciFinder, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.
• Ensured data comparability by using identical journals and time periods (2000-2009).

Main Results:

• No single database provided complete coverage of all publications for a given substance.
• Significant differences in database coverage were observed.
• Manual inspection of individual titles was necessary for a complete reference count.

Conclusions:

• Comprehensive literature searches necessitate the use of multiple chemical databases.
• Database storage methods significantly impact data recovery.
• Understanding database limitations is crucial for accurate chemical registration and analysis.