Searching for information on chemical substances in selected biomedical bibliographic databases.

A method was developed which allows effective searching for information on chemical substances in databases. Several searches for chemicals in bibliographic databases were carried out to analyse the method of indexing chemical names. The recall rates of documents were compared to evaluate information resources as well as searching strategies. Recall rates of documents searched with the CAS Nos. were compared to those searched with substance name. It turned out that searching for substances is most specific and fastest with CAS Nos. They should always be used whenever possible. However, this is not sufficient in many BDs, making an additional search using chemical names necessary. Specific search options that have to be considered for each database are reported.