Archive for the ‘Chemical IT’ Category
Friday, June 3rd, 2016
The title might give it away; this is my 500th blog post, the first having come some eight years ago. Very little online activity nowadays is excluded from measurement and so it is no surprise that this blog and another of my "other" scholarly endeavours, viz publishing in traditional journals, attract such "metrics" or statistics. The h-index is a well-known but somewhat controversial measure of the impact of journal articles; here I thought I might instead take a look at three less familiar ones – one relating to blogging, one specific to journal publishing and one to research data.
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Tags:Country: Svalbard and Jan Mayen, CrossRef, head of information resources, HTML, Imperial College, librarian, online activity, Online Usage, PDF, researcher, search engines, usage statistics portal
Posted in Chemical IT | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 30th, 2016
This is a follow-up to one aspect of the previous two posts dealing with nucleophilic substitution reactions at silicon. Here I look at the geometries of 5-coordinate compounds containing as a central atom 4A = Si, Ge, Sn, Pb and of the specific formula C34AO2 with a trigonal bipyramidal geometry. This search arose because of a casual comment I made in the earlier post regarding possible cooperative effects between the two axial ligands (the ones with an angle of ~180 degrees subtended at silicon). Perhaps the geometries might expand upon this comment?
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Tags:Anomer, Anomeric effect, Carbohydrate chemistry, Carbohydrates, Ligand, Molecular geometry, Physical organic chemistry, Stereochemistry, Stereoelectronic effect, Trigonal bipyramidal molecular geometry
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, May 24th, 2016
I occasionally post about "RDM" (research data management), an activity that has recently become a formalised essential part of the research processes. I say recently formalised, since researchers have of course kept research notebooks recording their activities and their data since the dawn of science, but not always in an open and transparent manner. The desirability of doing so was revealed by the 2009 "Climategate" events. In the UK, Climategate was apparently the catalyst which persuaded the funding councils (such as the EPSRC, the Royal Society, etc) to formulate policies which required all their funded researchers to adopt the principles of RDM by May 2015 and in their future researches. An early career researcher here, anxious to conform to the funding body instructions, sent me an email a few days ago asking about one aspect of RDM which got me thinking.
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Tags:Academic publishing, chemical identifiers, chemical names and chemical terms, chemical tagger page, CrossRef, Data management, Data management plan, DataCite, Identifiers, ORCiD, RDM, researcher, Royal Society, Singular spectrum analysis, Technical communication, Technology/Internet
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
I have previously commented on the Bürgi–Dunitz angle, this being the preferred approach trajectory of a nucleophile towards the electrophilic carbon of a carbonyl group. Some special types of nucleophile such as hydrazines (R2N-NR2) are supposed to have enhanced reactivity[cite]10.1016/S0040-4020(01)93101-1[/cite] due to what might be described as buttressing of adjacent lone pairs. Here I focus in on how this might manifest by performing searches of the Cambridge structural database for intermolecular (non-bonded) interactions between X-Y nucleophiles (X,Y= N,O,S) and carbonyl compounds OC(NM)2.
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Tags:Bases, Bürgi–Dunitz angle, Carbonyl, Electrophile, Ester, Flippin–Lodge angle, Functional groups, hydrazine, non-metal attachments, Nucleophile, Physical organic chemistry, search query, Superbase
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining | 1 Comment »
Sunday, April 17th, 2016
I want to describe a recent attempt by a group of collaborators to share the research data associated with their just published article.[cite]10.1021/jacs.5b13070[/cite]
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Tags:10.17616, Academic publishing, DataCite, energy profile diagrams, Figshare, Identifiers, Open science, ORCiD, PDF, Scholarly communication, Technical communication, Technology/Internet, Web-enhanced object
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Saturday, April 16th, 2016
Scientists are familiar with the term data, at least in a scientific or chemical context, but appreciating metadata (meaning "after", or "beyond") is slightly more subtle, in the sense of using it to mean data about data. The challenge lies in clarifying where the boundary between data and its metadata lies and in specifying and controlling the vocabulary used for these metadata descriptions. Items in a chemical metadata dictionary might include e.g. subject classifications such as Organic Molecular Chemistry or identifiers such as InChIkey. But what could metametadata be? Here I briefly show some examples by way of illustration.
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Tags:Academic publishing, automated software analysis, BASE, chemical context, Chemical Database Service, chemical metadata, chemical metadata dictionary, chemical space, City: Cambridge, Data dictionary, Data management, Identifiers, Knowledge representation, programmer, Registry of Research Data Repositories, search.datacite.org/api, SPECTRa, Technology/Internet
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2016
Publishing embargoes seem a relatively new phenomenon, probably starting in areas of science when the data produced for a scientific article was considered more valuable than the narrative of that article. However, the concept of the embargo seems to be spreading to cover other aspects of publishing, and I came across one recently which appears to take such embargoes into new and uncharted territory.
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Tags:Academic publishing, Embargo, Open access, Publishing, Royal Society of Chemistry, Technology/Internet, Uncharted, Uncharted Territory
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Saturday, April 2nd, 2016
A celebration of the life and work of the great chemist Paul von R. Schleyer was held this week in Erlangen, Germany. There were many fantastic talks given by some great chemists describing fascinating chemistry. Here I highlight the presentation given by Andy Streitwieser on the topic of organolithium chemistry, also a great interest of Schleyer's over the years. I single this talk out since I hope it illustrates why people still get together in person to talk about science.
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Tags:Centroid, chemical effect, chemical insights, chemical interpretation, City: Erlangen, Country: Germany, Degree of a continuous mapping, Ferrocene, Hydrogen bond, individual search definition, metal, overall search collection, Streitwieser, terminal H-positions, Torsion, X-ray
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining, Interesting chemistry | 6 Comments »
Monday, March 28th, 2016
Augmented reality, a superset if you like of virtual reality (VR), has really been hitting the headlines recently. Like 3D TV, its been a long time coming! Since ~1994 or earlier, there have been explorations of how molecular models can be transferred from actual reality to virtual reality using conventional computers (as opposed to highly specialised ones). It was around then that a combination of software (Rasmol) and hardware (Silicon Graphics, and then soon after standard personal computers with standard graphics cards) became capable of such manipulations. VRML (virtual reality modelling language) also proved something of a false start‡ So have things changed?
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Tags:Augmented reality, chemical article, Company: Microsoft, Company: Silicon Graph, for 3D printing, Google Cardboard, jmol, RasMol, User interface techniques, Virtual reality, VRML
Posted in Chemical IT, General | No Comments »