Chemistry Library Guide: SciFinder

CAS SciFinderⁿ is available via Databases A-Z list at the UCT Libraries website. You might be prompted to sign in via UCT Single-Sign-On when you open CAS SciFinderⁿ link. Use your existing UCT SciFinder login credentials to access the platform.

New to CAS SciFinderⁿ or new at UCT?

Register for a personal account using your UCT email on campus grounds at the SciFinder registration webpage from a computer connected to UCT network.

**Note that if a SciFinder account is idle for 18 months or more, access will be deactivated. To restore access, please contact help@cas.org.

If you encounter any difficulty, please contact your librarian Awot Gebregziabher awot.gebregziabher@uct.ac.za

Want to learn how to use SciFinderⁿ?

SciFinderⁿ Training provides short and material specific On-Demand training resources for different search types. Open one of the following topics.

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SciFinder is our major database for chemists.  Made available by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)--a division of the American Chemical Society--SciFinder is a research & discovery tool that allows you to explore the CAS databases, covering the literature from the field of chemistry and its many applications, including biomedical sciences, chemical engineering, materials science, agricultural science, environmental science, pharmaceuticals and more.  SciFinder consists of:

• CAplus:  is the online version of Chemical Abstracts from 1907 to the present--a comprehensive international chemistry database of scientific literature and patents.  It covers more than 10,000 scientific journals, and patents from more than 63 patent-granting authorities worldwide. More than 5000 references are added daily.
   
• CAS Registry:  is a vast databank of chemical substance information.  It covers organic, inorganic, and biosequence substances and includes both experimental and predicted physical and chemical property data.  The Registry contains chemical information for more than 79 million organic and inorganic substances and over 65 million biological sequences.
   
• CASREACT: is a chemical reaction database providing information and references for more than 57.2 million single and multi-step reactions, dating from 1840 to the present.
    
•  Medline: is the premier bibliographic database of the United States' National Library of Medicine.  It covers the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences.  Some 5,400 medical and biomedical journals are indexed, and coverage is from 1958 to the present.

SciFinder provides user-friendly search software that enables users to search the database in a variety of ways : using author names, research topics, chemical substance names or molecular formulae, chemical structures, chemical reactions, and organisation names.  A structure-drawing package allows users to draw structures on screen and search for them either as complete structures or as substructures of larger molecules.  

Note that when searching by topic in SciFinder, you don't need to use Boolean searching ... just enter your search requirements in a sentence or phrase.  SciFinder then performs a number of different Boolean searches and you are presented with a list of "candidate" results sets to choose from.