The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing

Abstract

The wealth of chemical information on the INSPEC Database is easily retrieved using the printed subject indexes to the associated abstract journals. However, this subject indexing is insufficient for machine retrieval, and free-text searching has special difficulties. An easy-to-use retrieval system has been developed which overcomes many problems, especially the retrieval of non-stoichiometric compositions, which are a feature of solid-state chemistry. The scheme is limited to inorganic material, but allows flexibility and identification of dopants, interfaces and surfaces or substrates. At the same time, a system has been introduced for the online retrieval of numerical data included in the database. This has successfully standardized the way in which such data is held for searching, enabling further refinement of searches where numerical information is significant.