Harvard Buys Chemical Software

Unsure of the structure of a favorite amino acid? No more sifting through pages of results or toggling back and forth among 10 different windows.

Harvard affiliates can now access information on more than 20 million chemical compounds, 11 million reactions, and 500 million chemical facts with the click of a mouse, thanks to a search platform the University recently purchased from Elsevier MDL, a leading publisher of scientific information.

The software, DiscoveryGate, also allows users to categorize their results and link them to primary sources.

Users can look up structures of various compounds, toxicity, metabolic pathways, and suppliers for the chemicals themselves.

“The primary difference is that the systems that Harvard has previously been using are individually distributed systems. In order to access 15 of 17 [systems], Harvard previously had to use five different applications that were completely unable to correlate common results,” said Timothy S. Hoctor, senior manager for market strategy for academic and government markets for Elsevier MDL. “The real value of the product is the ability to cross-correlate the data.”

It looks up specific results quickly and helps users get citations of key data without having to read an entire scholarly article.

Chemists can search the database according to chemical structure or reactions.

The University is one of five institutions throughout the world that has been involved in the testing of DiscoveryGate since December 2004. At Harvard, the process has been driven by Marcia L. Chapin, head librarian of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Libraries.

Chapin declined to comment for this story.

According to Hoctor, Harvard made several key suggestions that were eventually implemented, such as the necessity of making DiscoveryGate compatible with Macintosh computers in order for it to be viable in academic and corporate research and integrating a searchable index into the software.

Anyone with a Harvard IP address can download the DiscoveryGate software platform through https://discoverygate.com.