Integrated Workflow is Key
Tim Hoctor, Senior Product Manager, Elsevier MDL, Morristown, NJ, USA
In today’s digital world, site-wide access to platforms that search across thousands of journals for text information is now commonplace, but researchers in disciplines such as chemistry have a more refined need. How to search across multiple databases, using chemical structures as the fundamental query? What about searching on reactions and properties? And if it is possible to search a database in this way, isn’t there other content such as reference works and the primary literature that could be searched at the same time?
Chemists and technologists at Elsevier MDL focused on this problem by understanding individual discovery workflows. Chemists often start with an inquiry into structure or property. DiscoveryGate is designed to accommodate this starting point, providing one-query, unlimited access to more than 17 databases from a single interface. Within this system, researchers can also access major reference works in organic chemistry, and link directly from any of these resources to the original literature. Bibliographic references in all of the databases are hyperlinked so researchers can also go directly to an institution’s full-text holdings, either using DiscoveryGate’s OpenURL-compliant link resolver or linking to an institution’s link resolver of choice.
Recognizing that researchers utilize data from many different sources, DiscoveryGate's structure index contains chemical structures from many key information providers, such as Thomson/Derwent and Thomson/ISI, and provides access to reference works from John Wiley and Springer Verlag. Of course, it is also extensively linked to Elsevier content on the ScienceDirect platform. The interoperability of these two systems (DiscoveryGate and ScienceDirect) includes innovative features such as DYMOND Linking, which allows readers of Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters, to link directly to graphical representations of chemical structures from chemical objects within the text.
Specialist chemistry librarians already provide many sources of electronic information to their user communities. However, a single interface providing access to integrated information means students and researchers no longer have to be trained to know in which database certain types of data reside. Consistency across the interface and drawing tools make querying individual databases and reference works simple, and online tutorials and quick start guides have been developed by our educational services team to enable users to learn quickly. The result of all this is that researchers can quickly get to the information they need to make smarter workflow decisions sooner. 
Scirus, Elsevier's science-focused search engine, recently won the Web Marketing Association's 2004 WebAward
( www.webaward.org) for "Best Directory or Search Engine." Over 1,500 entries from across the globe were judged against criteria including overall design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting and ease of use. Previous winners include The New York Times, Kodak, Sony, Nike and FedEx.
www.scirus.com
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