Robo-Combing the Chemistry Literature For Mistakes

This is a very timely post indeed from Peter Murray-Rust. He's describing a system that his group has developed (ChemVisitor) to dig through the chemical literature looking for incorrect structures (and much more). He shows examples from an open-access paper, in which one of the structures is in fact misdrawn. But how would Elsevier, Nature, the ACS, Wiley or the other big publishers take to having these things highlighted every day of the week. Not well: So try it for yourself. Which compound is wrong? (*I* don’t know yet) How would you find out? Maybe you would go to Chemical Abstracts (ACS). Last time I looked it cost 6USD to look up a compound. That’s 50 dollars, just to check whether the literature is right. And you would be forbidden from publishing what you found there (ACS sent the lawyers to Wikipedia for publishing CAS registry numbers). What about Elsevier’s Reaxys? Almost certainly as bad. But isn’t there an Open collection of molecules? Pubchem in the NIH? Yes, and ACS lobbied on Capitol Hill to have it shut down as it was “socialised science instead of the private sector”. They nearly won. (Henry Rzepa and I ran a campaign to highlight the issue). So yes, we can use Pubchem and we have and that’s how Andy’s software discovered the mistake. This was the first diagram we analysed. Does that mean that every paper in the literature contains mistakes? Almost certainly yes. But they have been peer-reviewed. Yes – and we wrote software (OSCAR...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs