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While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)'s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.

Using tangible models to help students visualize chemical structures in three dimensions has been a mainstay of chemistry education for many years. Conventional chemistry modeling kits are, however, limited in the types and accuracy of the molecules, bonds and structures they can be used to build. The recent development of 3D printing technology has allowed a much wider variety of molecules to be created for teaching but is not simple to do. Creating the files needed to print molecular structures is often technically difficult and requires the use of multiple software programs, which are not always user-friendly. Not all educators or students have the resources or technical skill to create such files and so are put off trying to use 3D printing in the classroom. Here we demonstrate a simple method to easily generate the files needed for the 3D printing of almost any molecule using the National Institutes of Health Print Exchange server (or simple alternatives). The basic molecule structure may be created in-house or easily sourced online from databases such as UniProt or PubChem. The options for quickly and cheaply printing such structures in a range of materials using online and local stores, as well as in-house 3D printers, are explored and a simple protocol is described. The method brings 3D printing to a wider audience, thus helping to spread its use in chemical pedagogy, and may also be used in self-directed learning exercises by students themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change over time is a crosscutting theme in the sciences that is pivotal to reaction kinetics, an anchoring concept in undergraduate chemistry, and students' struggles with rates of change are well-documented. Informed by the education scholarship in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, a research team with members from complementary disciplinary backgrounds developed a rubric to examine how 10 general chemistry textbooks used by top producers of American-Chemical-Society-approved chemistry baccalaureates treat rates of change concepts in reaction kinetics. The rubric is focused on four categories of students' challenges that emerged from the literature review: (i) fluency with graphical representations, (ii) meaning of sign of rate of change, (iii) distinction between average and instantaneous rates of change, and (iv) connections between differential and integrated forms of the rate laws. The analysis reveals interesting patterns but also variability among the texts that, intriguingly, is not explained by the degree to which a text is calculus-based. An especially powerful aspect of the discipline-based education research lens is its ability to reveal missing conceptual links in the texts. For example, the analysis makes apparent specific gaps in the supports needed to help students move between representational forms (words, symbols, graphs) in the development of the differential form of the rate laws. The paper discusses the implications of the findings for chemistry instructors and chemical education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Android-based application has been developed to provide color-blind and visually impaired students a multisensory perception of color change observed in a titration. The application records and converts the color information into beep sounds and vibration pulses, which are generated by the smartphone. It uses a range threshold of hue and saturation coordinates of the HSV (hue, saturation, value) color space for detecting a color change specific to an indicator for, e.g., shades of pink for phenolphthalein-based titration, and informs the users before and upon attaining the end point. This approach can enable color-blind and visually impaired students to actively perform a fairly routine laboratory activity of titration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online chemical databases are the largest source of chemical information and, therefore, the main resource for retrieving results from published journals, books, patents, conference abstracts, and other relevant sources. Various commercial, as well as free, chemical databases are available. SciFinder, Reaxys, and Web of Science are three major chemical databases that contain extensive search options. Herein, we review these three databases for their search effectiveness and interface. This comparison will be useful to the undergraduates, graduates, nonchemistry majors, researchers, and new librarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of physical chemistry in biochemical disciplines need biochemical examples to capture the need, not always understood, of a difficult area in their studies. The use of thermodynamic data in the chemical reference state may lead to incorrect interpretations in the analysis of biochemical examples when the analysis does not include relevant conditions to the biochemical state. The definition of a new reference state for biochemical reactions in 1994 still contends with the low number of published and consistent compilations of thermodynamic data. To fill the gap in the organized presentation of biochemical thermodynamic data, reliable sources of databases of biochemical thermodynamic data are discussed, along with textbooks and specialized academic sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three new examples are presented illustrating three-dimensional chemical information searches of the Cambridge structure database (CSD) from which basic core concepts in organic and inorganic chemistry emerge. These include connecting the regiochemistry of aromatic electrophilic substitution with the geometrical properties of hydrogen bonding interactions to the ring, the gauche conformational effect in 1,2-disubstituted ethanes, and square planar versus tetrahedral coordination in four-coordinate transition metals. The searches take only a short time and can be readily incorporated into a variety of teaching environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature searches are essential for scientists. Thus, courses on how to do a good literature search have been integrated in studies at CPE Lyon for many years. Recently, we modified our pedagogical approach in order to initiate students progressively in the search for chemical information. In addition, this new teaching organization is now based on a "learn and prompt practice" concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citation searching and bibliometrics are terms foreign to many chemists and educators, yet well-known and used by librarians and information specialists. This article aims to help chemistry students, educators, and other readers of this Journal to better appreciate and use these powerful and profound methods. Although these subjects have been described previously, several developments in the methods and new alternative metrics have occurred in the intervening 16 years, so the field is being reviewed again. Citation practices have also contributed to the study of bibliometrics which is used to evaluate publications, authors, and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crystallographic information provides the fundamental basis for understanding the properties and behavior of materials. This data, such as chemical composition, unit cell dimensions, space group, and atomic positions, derives from the primary literature-that is, from published experimental measurement or theoretical calculation. Although the major crystallographic journals provide their published data in the form of computer-readable *.cif text files, finding and accessing this material directly is often difficult and certainly time-consuming. On the other hand, we are fortunate to have ready access through the Internet to extensive crystallographic databases, both academic/commercial and free, where the former databases are critically compiled and of the highest quality. The available databases generally specialize, as for inorganic or organic materials, or minerals, etc. The current paper is directed at the occasional user of crystallographic information, and examines methods of searching for and obtaining crystallographic information (mainly inorganic and minerals, but also organic, biological and metallic) from some important free databases; namely: NIMS AtomWorks for inorganics; the Crystallography Open Database (COD) for both inorganics and organics; WWW-Mincryst for minerals; the Protein Databank (PDB) for proteins and nucleic acids; and the Database of Zeolite Structures. An example of a search repeatedly used here demonstrates the changes in information provided from the first X-ray structural determination (of halite by the father-and-son Braggs) to modern representations. The professional researcher is best served by the academic/commercial databases: Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD); Cambridge Structure Database (CSD) for organics; Pearson's Crystal Data (PCD) for inorganics; Crystmet for metallic systems, etc. However, free demonstration versions of these important databases provide user introductions and, indeed, usable data for a limited range of materials. A Table provides information and rapid access details for 11 of the major crystallographic databases. This text is directed toward the search for data, but some indication is given as to how the data collected may be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking and analytical problem-solving skills in research involves using different search strategies. A proposed concept for an "Imploded Boolean Search" combines three unique identifiable field types to perform a search: keyword(s), numerical value(s), and a chemical structure or reaction. The object of this type of search is to help refine, narrow, and speed the searching process for finding relevant information, which would otherwise yield humanly unmanageable result sets. This search strategy is introduced to third year chemistry students in an information literacy workshop using SciFinder, Reaxys, and Web of Science Structure Search. The aim of the workshop is to help students develop hands-on familiarity on the use of chemistry databases and search strategies for scientific information retrieval. The "Imploded Boolean Search" adds a new skill set to a student's arsenal of search strategies. A survey and training exercise are used to assess the workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing skills for searching the patent literature is an essential element of chemical information literacy programs at the university level. The present article creates awareness of patents as a rich source of chemical information. Patent classification is introduced as a key-component in comprehensive search strategies. The free Espacenet patent search interface and classification browser are used in a case study related to the chemistry of graphene. Step-by-step instructions are provided on how to identify search concepts, retrieve classification symbols with keywords, and iteratively refine the chemical concept based search. Instructional material for the use in chemical literature courses is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 edition of the American Chemical Society's Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures for Bachelor's Degree Programs identifies six skill sets that undergraduate chemistry programs should instill in their students. In our roles as support staff for chemistry departments at two different institutions (one a Primarily Undergraduate Institution, the other a research intensive university), we have been collaboratively studying these requirements and have found significant synergies between two in particular: "Chemical Literature and Information Management Skills" and "Laboratory Safety Skills". We believe that by integrating emerging tools in the laboratory safety field into information literacy frameworks, a strong foundation can be established for the development of all the skills called out by the ACS. This article describes this strategy and provides examples of how these concepts can be implemented in both the chemistry teaching and research laboratory settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various tactile methods, such as Braille, have been employed to enhance the recognition ability of chemical structures by individuals with visual disabilities. However, it is unknown whether reading aloud the names of chemical compounds would be effective in this regard. There are no systems currently available using an audio component to assist in the recognition of chemical structures. This study aims to establish the essential requirements for the prototype Chemical Literature Extraction and Aloudreading System (CLeArS) that enables visually impaired people to recognize a depicted chemical structure after hearing its name, which complies with the nomenclature adopted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Details of the methods employed in CLeArS and its execution are presented, in addition to the fundamental requirements for recognizing chemical structures using CLeArS. Experimental results on 450 images comprising both simple and complex chemical structures show a high recognition rate of 90% among subjects with visual disabilities. Thus, we conclude that reading aloud the names of chemical compounds is an effective method enabling students with impaired vision to recognize chemical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our students rely on Wikipedia on their mobile devices or laptops, since it is an extremely rich and broad resource. This article overviews the Chemistry content on Wikipedia and how students can learn to use it effectively as an information resource, critically evaluating content, and learning key information literacy skills. We also discuss how students' information literacy skills can be improved through a class project where students edit Wikipedia articles. Through such projects, students may begin to appreciate where and how chemical information is generated, gathered, developed, and shared in the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of computerized information that organizations collect and process is growing so large that the term Big Data is commonly being used to describe the situation. Accordingly, Big Data is defined by a combination of the Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity of the data being processed. Big Data tools are already having an impact in chemical industry and research, and it is time to discuss whether at least an introduction to these developments might be incorporated into undergraduate chemical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Pennsylvania's doctoral chemistry curriculum has included a required course in chemical information since 1995. Twenty years later, the course has evolved from a loosely associated series of workshops on information resources to a holistic examination of the chemical literature and its place in the general research process. The introduction of enhanced group assignments, a term project that aims to teach another researcher to search, and final examination questions that test a student's ability to navigate the literature efficiently help new PhD students develop the information skills that they will need to succeed in their graduate research and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new graduate chemistry course was introduced in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Alabama. The new course, CH584?Literature and Communication in Graduate Chemistry, replaced a second year graduate student literature seminar requirement. Course topics included chemical information resources, critical analysis, scientific writing, scientific presentations, and peer-review. CH584 was well received by both the chemistry faculty and chemistry graduate students. This article discusses the detailed implementation and content taught in CH584. Moreover, we present our experiences teaching CH584 as well as potential revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blended model for information literacy instruction described in this article introduces students not only to efficient techniques for finding scientific literature and properties of chemical compounds, but also to managing this information with a bibliographic management program (EndNote Online). The model blends face-to-face instruction with online tutorials posted on a LibGuide page prepared for each course. A graded online assignment designed in SurveyMonkey was used to assess student learning. During the instruction, students learned to find literature in Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, SciFinder, and Web of Science. They also searched for properties of chemical compounds in ChemSpider, PubChem, Reaxys, and SciFinder using a chemical name, molecular formula, CAS Registry Number, or by drawing a molecular structure. The results from the assignments showed that students learned how to find literature and chemical property information efficiently and use a bibliographic management program to store, organize, share, and cite references. This article presents the implementation of the model in two small (40-60 students) and one large (380- 460 students) undergraduate chemistry courses. The information literacy instruction described in this article was carried out in more than 20 undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Maryland College Park. It provided more than 5000 students with versatile skills that they can use throughout their college education and even later in their professional life. The design of the model and its implementation was a result of a close collaboration between the chemistry librarian and the course instructors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impetus to incorporate instruction on the efficient and responsible practice of chemical information literacy into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum has become exceptionally urgent. At Rider University, Chemical Information Instruction (CII) has accordingly evolved from face-to-face sessions into online modules to embed information literacy skills into an Organic Chemistry II course. Through multiple methods of evaluation and assessment of student learning, the e-tutorial grew from a series of seven modules narrated by the science librarian, hosted on the University Libraries intranet, and created with labor intensive e-learning authoring software, into a series of 14 modules complete with detailed storyboards, narrated by the Organic Chemistry professor, hosted freely on the Internet, and created with simpler user-friendly software. This article describes the technological development, feedback-driven revisions, and assessment of student learning outcomes of this virtual tutorial series, while a companion article in this Journal addresses the execution and assessment of an accompanying capstone research report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widely acknowledged need to include chemical information competencies and communication skills in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum can be accommodated in a variety of ways. We describe a team-taught, semester-length course at Wright State University which combines chemical information literacy, written and oral communication skills, professional ethics, and career preparation. The chemical literature instruction includes evaluation of sources, practice with scientific databases, and an introduction to reference management. Written communication skills are addressed in a term paper assignment which includes a peer review exercise to provide students with exposure to an author's and a reviewer's perspective. Students' oral communication skills are honed through training in presentation techniques and the completion of several speaking assignments. Resume'-writing, professional ethics discussions, and presentations by alumni who are employed in a variety of chemistry-related positions contribute to the course's career preparation goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information literacy is of paramount importance to any successful research program. Information techniques and skills should be infused throughout a student's undergraduate curriculum rather than being the focus of a single course. To this end, we have created several courses, beginning in the first year, where students review current scientific literature, design experiments, collect and analyze data, and disseminate their findings in both written and oral formats. At the completion of this sequence of courses, students have a greater understanding of all aspects of chemical research from identification of reliable sources through articulation of their findings. Details about the creation and implementation of the Stepping Stone Approach to chemical information literacy are discussed within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem-based learning methods support student learning of content as well as scientific skills. In the course of problem-based learning, students seek outside information related to the problem, and therefore, information literacy skills are practiced when problem-based learning is used. This work describes a mixed-methods approach to investigate the information seeking behavior of students in a problembased organic chemistry laboratory course, when information literacy is not explicitly taught. Discourse analysis was used to analyze student audio recordings taped during problem solving sessions in order to explore the process by which students' find and use outside sources of information during a set of problem-based learning activities. Student generated artifacts produced during problem solving were quantitatively transformed and used to evaluate the product of students' searching processes. Evidence from both aspects of the study suggests that students do not demonstrate development of information literacy skills in the absence of explicit instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How chemical information is produced, distributed, discovered, managed, shared, and preserved has changed significantly in the past two decades. The number of publications continues to grow exponentially, and most of the core chemistry literature is now available online. Understanding how to navigate this digital landscape is essential for students, educators, and researchers. Similar to calibrating and learning how to use lab instruments, developing information literacy skills enables researchers to use their time more effectively and efficiently. In response to an open call for papers, this issue contains 26 papers that are grouped into three broad subject areas: Information Skills, Prototypes and Best Practices, and Discovery. Papers in this special issue aim to be a resource for ideas and a catalyst for expanding communication and collaboration between chemists and information professionals. Because some areas of chemical information are not included in this issue, topics for future issues of the Journal of Chemical Education are suggested at the end of this editorial. Note: Papers in the Journal of Chemical Education Special Issue: Chemical Information have a designation that they are part of the collection published in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of "big data" science, data management is becoming a key information literacy skill for chemistry professionals. To introduce this skill in the undergraduate chemistry major, an activity has been developed to familiarize undergraduates with data management. In this activity, students rename and organize cards that represent "data files" associated with experiments they completed in a previous course. This activity reveals differences between the way novices (students) and experts (librarians and faculty) organize data and highlights the need for introducing students to best practices in data management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the findings of a survey of American Chemical Society (ACS)-approved colleges and universities that summarizes how chemical information instruction (CII) has changed since 1990. It is noted that all surveys prior to 1984 examined CII activity taught within formal course settings only. The survey instrument was sent to the heads of chemistry departments of ACS-approved universities, and one dollar was offered by the authors to be donated to the ACS Project SEED for each survey returned to encourage a significant number of responses.

The article focuses on the significance of the Chemistry in the News to teach Chemistry in the real-world issues and expose students to all aspects of Science communication in the U.S. Its activities include the study, creation and peer review of online projects basing on actual news articles and connects real-world social, economic and political issues in the study on the field of Chemistry. It is based on constructivist learning theory conceptualizing that scientific concepts with real-world experience can help the high school students learn and remember the idea of the study.

The article presents a review of a chemical information course. It reports that since 1995, the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Chemistry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has mandated a course in chemical information searching for all of its first-year graduate students. This course has evolved over the years to meet the needs of beginning chemists in a changing information environment. The present course is based almost exclusively on the eight-week model initiated by researcher Carol Carr in 1997. Student evaluations had indicated that the course would be more valuable if it focused on individual areas of chemistry. Students also enjoyed the hands-on sessions. By dividing the class along disciplinary lines, the individual sections were small enough to fit into the library's electronic classroom for each class.

The chemical information requirements of nonscience majors are significantly different from the requirements of science majors, but these needs are equally important. Few projects have addressed the chemical information requirements for nonscience majors since chemical information literacy for science majors is often seen as the more immediate issue. Requiring nonscience majors to become familiar with the types of available information and resources is an important part of mitigating the science phobias both of students and of the general public. Among the reasons that chemical information training is focused most often on the science majors is that these students take many more classes within a chemistry department, and both upper-level courses and independent research creates the need for the effective application of chemical information.