COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the world's leading provider of chemical information, today introduced major enhancements to its SciFinder® research tool. One new feature is SciPlanner™, a ground-breaking interactive workspace that enables scientists to more quickly identify synthesis options for designing the best research pathways and approaches.

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SciPlanner allows users to create customized reaction pathways as well as organize and manage SciFinder results in ways they find most useful. Users can integrate reactions, experimental procedures, substances, and references from multiple documents. Specifically, the new tool enables researchers to:

• For the first time ever, create complete reaction pathways from individual reactions across multiple publications that are indexed in the CAS databases.
• Visualize and consolidate preferred reaction strategies in a single place and combine them with references, structures, reactions, and substances.
• Create reports to share specific reaction pathways for assignment, distribution, and presentation to colleagues.

In addition, new convenience features have been added to SciFinder that allow users to:

• Sort reference answer sets by citation count to identify influential authors, research concepts, and potential collaborators.
• Copy/paste ISIS/Draw structures directly into the SciFinder structure drawing editor to save time.
• Extend searches to articles cited in Medline references with the addition of citation data to Medline records.

"SciPlanner is taking research to a new level," said Christine McCue, vice president of marketing, CAS. "It allows scientists to better leverage CAS' authoritative content by organizing search results the way they want to help them to create new pathways and arrive at decisions faster."

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About SciFinder

SciFinder® is the leading research tool for chemists and researchers, providing the essential content and proven results scientists need to increase productivity and make faster breakthroughs. The intuitive, award-winning application offers instant access to more references than any other scientific search service as well as the most comprehensive collection of chemical substance and reaction information, including CAS REGISTRY(SM) — the gold standard of chemical substance collections. Fortune 500 corporations, more than 1,800 universities, and major government agencies around the world rely on SciFinder to fuel R&D initiatives and foster innovation.

About CAS

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, is the world's authority for chemical information. Our databases are curated and quality-controlled by CAS scientists, and recognized by chemical and pharmaceutical companies, universities, government organizations, and patent offices around the world as authoritative. By combining these databases with advanced search and analysis technologies (SciFinder®, STN®, and Science IP® products and services), CAS delivers the most current, complete, and cross-linked secure digital information environment for scientific discovery. Learn more at www.cas.org.

SOURCE Chemical Abstracts Service