CAS News

From the CHMINF-L list:

CAS LEADS INDUSTRY IN SUBSTANCE INFORMATION WITH GROWTH OF PROPERTIES TO OVER ONE BILLION

Atlanta - Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has enriched its databases with a record-breaking quantity of properties data and other substance and document information, building upon its reputation as the leading high quality information resource for chemistry and related research. Nearly 1.1 billion predicted and experimental properties, tags that refer to additional data, and spectra have been added to CAS Registry records for 19 million substances. CAS demonstrated its new database content and search enhancements at the American Chemical Society national meeting held this week in Atlanta.

"Along with our significant enhancements to substance information in the CAS Registry, growth of the literature and patents represented in the CAplus database has been unprecedented," said Dr. Catharina Maulbecker, CAS Vice President, Marketing and Sales. "Our scientists added more than 981,000 document records in 2005, which was 13.4% more than the previous year. CAS databases have become even more valuable for a wide range of chemistry-related research."

CAS achieved another scientific literature milestone in January 2006 when the 150 millionth citation was entered into CAplus. The cited document was European Patent Application 410301, "Fire-resistant polyamide-brominated polystyrene blends," assigned to BASF. This was cited in World Patent Office patent WO 2006007580, dealing with aromatic polyamide compositions.

CAS also increased the volume and variety of its substance information collection in several ways:

* The CAS Registry database reached a total of more than 27 million organic and inorganic substance records with the addition of nearly 2 million records during 2005.

* CAS Registry has been enhanced with the addition of experimental NMR and IR spectra from Wiley Subscriptions and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

* CASREACT(r) grew to more than 10 million reactions, including over 4.2 million single-step reactions and more than 5.8 million multi-step reactions.

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, provides the world's largest and most current collection of chemical and related scientific information, including the most authoritative database of chemical substances, the CAS Registry. CAS combines these databases with advanced search and analysis technologies to deliver the most complete and effective digital information environment for scientific research and discovery, including such products as SciFinder(r), SciFinder Scholar(tm), STN(r), STN Express(r) and STN AnaVist(tm), among others.
The CAS web site is www.cas.org.

Eric Shively
CAS