Introduction Search Fields Author Controlled Index Numerical Chemical Astronomical Tutorials
INSPEC's chemical field allows for easier searching of chemicals and their compounds, as well as some other roles they may have. The Chemical field is for searching for elements and inorganic compounds and systems. Here are the specific chemical roles that you can search by in addition to and "All Chemical Roles" search.
| Role/Field Name | Description of field search |
| element | |
| binary | Compounds or systems with two components |
| system | Compounds or systems with three or more components |
| interface system | Semiconductor junctions, devices, integrated circuits, electrochemical batteries, etc. |
| surface or substrate | Used for surface or substrate, e.g. oxidation, corrosion, wear of iron. |
| adsorbate or sorbate | Used for species being (ads)sorbed. |
| dopant | Used for systems into which an impurity is diffused and those in which the impurity is a probe. |
Sample Search
Let's say you are doing research on water masers. You start by searching "masers".
There are too many articles, so you then search "water masers".
This is a much smaller set, but you also get some articles that aren't on water masers, so you then search "water masers" as a phrase.
This is also has decreased the size of the result set, but what if the word "water" isn't used in an article, but H2O is. So you search "masers" and "h2o" in the topic field.
Only five articles! So you don't have to go through the mess above you can simply use the chemical search field.
While there are a lot of results, this set can be narrowed in other ways, and by comparison this set is better overall that any of the previous result sets. You have decreased and removed many useless articles from the initial searches, but you have also increased you numbers from your third and fourth searches to include many useful articles that were not found in those searches.
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Photo of Titan by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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