LibGuides: Chemistry: SciFinder

Getting Started with SciFinder

Connect to SciFinder
Register Now
If you don't have a personal SciFinder account at UT-Austin, click on the Register link to begin this process. If you already have a SciFinder account from another institution, you still have to re-register here for a new account. An email address ending with utexas.edu is required. See below for details on who can register and who can't.
SciFinder Mobile
CAS offers a smartphone-friendly version of SciFinder. (Note: You can't do structure searches and there are no links to full text.) To connect, point your device's browser to this URL: scifinder.cas.org/mobile and log in with your SciFinder ID and password. You don't need to be on the campus network.

Access from Off Campus: Proxy vs VPN

To get to all our licensed resources while outside the campus network, you must use our Proxy Server to establish a session that carries a recognized UT Austin IP address. Two methods:

Follow a link from any Library web page, catalog record or database directory, and enter your UT EID and password when prompted. Multifactor authentication with Duo is then required.
Bookmark this link in your browser:
http://ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/login?url=https://scifinder-n.cas.org

VPN will not work for this purpose, and will interfere with a proxy connection. Exit VPN and proceed through your local network to establish a proxied connection via links on the Libraries' pages.

Coming from another institution?

If you're new to UT but used SciFinder at a previous institution, your old account won't work here. Create a new one by registering above with your utexas.edu email address. TIP: If your web browser "remembers" and automatically enters your old SciFinder login ID and password, you'll have to clear that out and update it with your new one.

Who can use SciFinder?

Individuals affiliated with UT-Austin may register for a personal SciFinder account and use it from any computer that is connected to or proxied through the campus network, including library workstations. Authorized persons include:

Currently enrolled students
Currently appointed faculty and staff
Retired and emeritus faculty and staff (with official retiree status)
Currently appointed postdocs
Official visiting scholars (with valid faculty/staff UT EID and utexas.edu email address)

These types of individuals are not allowed to register for or use SciFinder:

Alumni and former students (1 semester after departure)
Former faculty, staff; former postdocs
Unofficial visitors (without faculty/staff UT EID or utexas email address)
Library Courtesy Borrowers
General Public

Terms of Use

Use of SciFinder must be for educational and academic research purposes only. Commercial use - including patentability searching - on behalf of any profit-making entity, regardless of one's personal status at UT, is not permitted. Users must agree to these terms when connecting to the resource. CAS actively monitors and reports suspect activity, and violation of the terms of use may result in loss of access.

SciFinder Reference Searching

The functions of SciFinder are often not intuitive, especially in how it searches for references using keyword terms, and how it sorts results. Be sure to consult the Help pages to improve your chances for a successful search.

The main References Search box supports Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), nesting with parentheses, and wildcards. BUT: Boolean operators are not functional within the ADVANCED search fields or the "Search within Results" filter. Also, there is no way to specify proximity between terms.
Multiple unrelated terms entered in the main Search Box are connected with an implied OR operator. This is not intuitive (most other familiar databases and search engines use an implied AND). If you want all the terms present in your results, use the AND operator or enclose phrases within quotes.
- A feature called Precision Reference Search causes multi-term queries that match subject headings in CAS' internal thesaurus (Lexicon) to be treated as single-concept terms, reducing the size of result sets. However, truncating a term with an asterisk bypasses this feature.
Relevance ranking of reference results is now possible. Re-sorting by reverse date may be advisable in some cases.
Author name searching is even less intuitive, particularly when trying to include alternate forms of a name. Punctuation in names is critical -- include the comma.
Searching by publication information for a known reference (using journal, year, volume, etc.) is still possible using the Publication Name advanced search field.
The underlying search algorithm is frequently updated behind the scenes. This means that results from a given query may not be the same over time.

Sources of Help and Training

SciFinder Help Guide
Quick Reference Guide (PDF)
About SciFinder
SciFinder Training Resources
What's New - Enhancements
Track enhancements to the search interface and functionality.
Substance Roles - descriptions
Roles are codes that describe the context of a Registry substance within an indexed document, useful in filtering reference results when you start from a substance search. Examples: Preparation; Analytical Study; Uses, etc.
SciFinder Mobile
CASSI
Look up publication title abbreviations.

What's in SciFinder?

SciFinder is by far the most comprehensive source of research-level chemical information. It provides integrated access to these Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) databases, plus Medline:

CAPLUS
Comprehensive bibliographic indexing of chemical literature, 1907-present
CAS Registry
Chemical substance records with structures; names, synonyms; CAS Registry Numbers; calculated and experimental properties and spectra
CASREACT
Millions of single and multistep organic reactions, 1986-present (with some added data back to 1840)
CHEMCATS
Data on commercial availability of chemicals
CHEMLIST
Data on regulatory information on chemicals
MARPAT
Generic Markush structures from patents, 1988-present
MEDLINE
Primary index to peer-reviewed biomedical literature, 1946-present
PatentPak
An added feature within SciFinder-n that provides contextual access to full text patent documents.

SciFinder vs Reaxys

SciFinder and Reaxys are complementary resources, and although there is some overlap the two are quite different in their respective literature coverage, and the ways they register compounds and index reactions. It's advisable to consult both databases for the most complete coverage of compounds, reactions, and properties.

No news at the moment!

CAS is always introducing new features to the interface (mostly to structure/reaction areas), and you can see notices of changes at their What's New page.