Chemical information education

Abstract

The role of chemical information education in a modern chemistry curriculum has been discussed in several articles and editorials [1][2][3][4], and there seems to be a general consensus about the need for such activities. The 1983 guidelines of the American Chemical Society for undergraduate education [5] for example state that “Students preparing for professional work in chemistry must learn how to retrieve specific information from the enormous and rapidly expanding chemical literature. The increasing volume and complexity of the literature means that students can no longer acquire skills in information retrieval without some formal instruction.” In contrast to this clear statement, however, only about a third of the universities and colleges in the United States actually fulfill this obligation by offering formal instruction [4]. Chemists in industry, for example, stated 1985 in the course of a program training end-users in online retrieval “We have found little evidence for prior formal education and training in the use of chemical information among the participants of the program” [6]. In Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, the situation looks even worse, with a few notable exceptions like the chemistry department of the Universität Frankfurt where chemical information is now compulsory for all chemistry students [7].