Tuesday 24 April 2007

Chemical textbook blogging

By way of Peter Murray-Rust's blog (whom it's great to see back blogging), I came across a link to a Reactive Reports interview with Steve Bachrach who is the process of publishing a textbook entitled "Computational Organic Chemistry". One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion is that in order to keep readers of the book up to date, he has started a blog. Presumably, this will also form the basis of a subsequent edition of the textbook.

Blog entries on particular topics include full literature references with DOIs, as well as molecular citations using InChIs. If Egon adds this blog to Chemical Blogspace, it will be a valuable source of information for annotating molecules (via the InChI) and papers (via the DOI, and the Chemical Blogspace Greasemonkey script).

I wonder if the text of Open Access journal articles can be mined in the same way by Chemical Blogspace? This would allow users, while browsing the table of contents pages of any journal, to see whether any Open Access articles cite it, and to see the relevant quotes from that article.

1 comment:

Egon Willighagen said...

One could imagine indeed that one would put the full sentence to which the cite is bound as 'comment' on the article, or maybe even better the full paragraph. But I am not sure if that would be effective, being free text and one would not put in an article 'have you read this crappy article[56]'. Instead, those qualifications are between lines, and often later as in: 'a method has been developed[56]. ... later ... However, this method has these shortcommings ...'

That why blogs are so nice. You can make those harsh statements :)