A Century’s Worth Of Supporting Information

More than a century’s worth of supplemental data and other information from published chemical research is now available from ACS. The society has completed a project to digitize supporting information associated with 40,000 journal articles published by ACS from 1879 to 1995.

Supporting information is often critical to understanding a particular research article, says Brandon A. Nordin, vice president of sales, marketing, and digital strategy for ACS Publications. The data help scientists “by providing additional context, relevance, and a sound basis for comparing results,” he says.

The archived ACS data are searchable, can be downloaded for free from the abstract page of each paper, and have metadata associated with them. In total, the archive includes some 800,000 pages of tables, illustrations, diagrams, spectroscopic and crystallographic results, experimental procedures, software code, biological data, mathematical derivations, and other supplementary information.

ACS’s effort “preserves and makes broadly accessible a significant amount of the 20th century’s primary research data for the global community of chemists,” Nordin says. “The availability of this digital material will also eliminate the need for librarians and their patrons to purchase this information via microfiche format and will give researchers immediate access to the data they need.”

ACS publishes more than 40 chemistry-related journals as well as C&EN.