Author: Anna Sackmann

If you work with small molecules and value reliable crystallographic data, you probably already know about the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), a collection of almost 400,000 organic and organometallic crystal structures.  But did you know that UCB students, faculty and staff have access to WebCSD, an online portal to the CSD?  With the intuitive interface of the WebCSD and no need to download data or software, the WebCSD is an excellent instructional tool for the classroom as well as an advanced research tool for the laboratory.

Features of WebCSD include:

• Substructure searching
• Similarity searching
• Text/numeric searching (journal reference, compound name, all text)
• Reduced cell searching
• Easy structure and result export features
• Customizable 3D display

To read more about WebCSD, click here.
The full CSD client system is still available for downloading here.

PMC, formerly PubMed Central, is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, currently containing approximately 2.5 million articles.

PMC is a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the Public Access Policy mandated by NIH and other research funding agencies. The repository includes material dating back prior to the NIH mandate, including some which date to the mid to late 1800s or early 1900s. A sampling of journals going back to volume 1 includes American Journal of Human Genetics (v. 1, 1949-),  Biophysical Journal (v. 1, 1960-), and Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society (v.1, 1865-).

Almost all the content of PMC is protected by U.S. and/or foreign copyright laws, although access is free for all materials. Respective copyright holders retain rights for reproduction, redistribution and reuse.

MIT CogNet is a resource for information in brain and cognitive science. It includes searchable electronic access to the most up-to-date editions of ten reference works in the brain and cognitive sciences published by The MIT Press. Among these are: The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, The Visual Neurosciences, The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th ed. and The Handbook of Multisensory Processes. The full text of six MIT Press journals and abstracts from other major journals in the subject areas of brain and cognitive science are also found here. Additionally, the full text of over 400 books and conference proceedings are available. MIT CogNet is continually being updated.

Global Daily 2010 is a global climate database from EarthInfo.

Global Daily contains over 63 million climate data records from a total of 179 countries, covering all 7 continents on Earth. The climate data records cover the time period from 1833-2010. The data originate from the Global Historical Climatology Network via the National Climatic Data Center. Primary data elements include: maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and precipitation. Secondary elements include: evaporation, soil temperature, and wind movement.

[Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory/Jeff Key]

Natural Standard is an international research collaboration that aggregates and synthesizes data on complementary and alternative medical therapies, such as herbs and dietary supplements.  Information presented is evidence-based, consensus-based, and peer reviewed.  Natural Standard is a full-text source, and contains references to the primary literature.  The quality of available scientific evidence for each entry on the use of a therapy for specific medical conditions is graded A to F (strong positive to strong negative evidence).  Natural Standard also includes a variety of tools, such as nutrition labels and calculators, and interaction checkers.