New free CAS service

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Their Press Release (my comment follows at the end): 

CAS LAUNCHES FREE WEB SERVICE CONNECTING SCIENTISTS TO HIGH INTEREST
RESEARCH IN CHEMISTRY

SCIENCE SPOTLIGHT(SM) Delivers View of Most Highly Cited and Requested
Chemistry Documents

Columbus, Ohio, August 14, 2001 - A new web service from Chemical
Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society,
reveals the most highly cited and requested chemistry-related research
publications as reflected by the citations included in the CAS databases
and the full-text documents requested by scientists through the ChemPort
Connection.  CAS Science Spotlight will provide not only lists of highly
cited and requested documents, but also the bibliographic and abstract
information along with the full text, where available, all free of charge.

o Most Cited Journal Articles, Journals and Patent Families in CAS
databases 1999-2000 CAS Science Spotlight lists the documents most cited,
for the last two publication years, in the patents, conference
proceedings, Web preprints or one of the 8,000 journals covered by CAS ...

o Most Requested Documents of the Quarter CAS Science Spotlight identifies
the scientific papers and chemistry-related patents for which researchers
have most frequently requested the full text via the CAS ChemPort
Connection, available through STN, SciFinder and SciFinder Scholar.  In
its initial release Spotlight lists the Most Requested documents for a
five-week period during the most recent quarter.  Future updates will be
offered quarterly. ... "In 1999, CAS began adding citations to our
bibliographic database at a rate of nearly 20 million per year," said CAS
Director, Robert J. Massie. ...  "We thank our colleagues in primary
publishing for their cooperation in launching Spotlight, and look forward
to working with them and individual researchers to evolve this program in
the years to come." ...  CAS Science Spotlight can be found on the web at
http://www.cas.org/spotlight/ or through a link from the CAS home page.
...
 
Eric Shively
CAS
eshively@cas.org
------------------

My comment:

That comes to 50 free documents a year, at most. They speak,
appropriately, of evolving, since they're still somewhere in the Early
Precambrian.

David Goodman
Biology Librarian 
and Digital Resources Researcher
Princeton University Library
Princeton, NJ 08544-0001
phone: 609-258-3235
fax: 609-258-2627
e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu