Emily Wild Presented at American Chemical Society Spring 2022 Conference

Emily Wild, Princeton University Library’s (PUL) chemistry, geosciences and environmental studies librarian, presented her poster session on “Library instruction for asymmetric organocatalysis publications” at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Spring 2022 virtual conference in March 2022.

The presentation, which was attended by international chemistry librarians and information professionals, was part of the invited poster Sci-Mixer event and during the technical poster session titled “Chemical Information Across the Chemistry Enterprise.”

Wild’s poster summarized the information provided during research consultations from October 2021 to March 2022 for the topic of asymmetric organocatalysis, related to David MacMillian’s Nobel in Chemistry awarded on October 6, 2021. The poster gave an overview of catalysis, importance of critical minerals and metals in catalysis, and the PUL chemistry collections, as well as open access and freely available information, for asymmetric organocatalysis research for various educational experiences.  

Additionally, Wild presented her project “Citation analysis for open-access content in theses and dissertations” as part of the oral technical session “The Ethics and Equity of Open.” This project gives an overview of the chemistry senior theses, graduate dissertations, and the industry partnerships with Princeton Forrestal Center. In it, she detailed how academia and industry partners can access chemistry open access publications and embargoed citations for senior theses and dissertations and how the materials are used in research.

“Access and availability of chemistry citations and publications contrast the access and availability of geosciences citations and publications in senior theses and dissertations,” Wild said. “The most useful bibliographic databases with freely available full-text access for literature reviews used in most geosciences research projects are openly available from world geological surveys and geosciences societies, such as geological surveys in the United States (USGS), Quebec (MERN), France (BRGM) and Germany (BGR), and geosciences societies like the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and European Geosciences Union (EGU), where a summary of all open access publications by geosciences societies are summarized by the American Geosciences Institute (AGI).

“Other resources include the non-profit database provider GeoScienceWorld (and its map based search OpenGeoSci), as well as open citation search platform of geosciences research AAPG Datapages,” she explained. In contrast, core resources for literature reviews in chemistry research are SciFinder-N and Reaxys, both of which are completely behind paywalls,” Wild explained. “I have been very excited to read the recent contributions from chemistry colleagues that are summarizing the issues of access for students we worry about as chemistry librarians and information professionals, such as “CAS Common Chemistry in 2021: Expanding Access to Trusted Chemical Information for the Scientific Community” and “The Open Reaction Database,” she added. 

After interesting scholarly discussions at the ACS Spring 2022 conference, Wild was recommended to present a subject comparison of citation availability in senior theses and dissertations from the Department of Chemistry to the Department of Geosciences at the upcoming Division of Chemical Information (CINF) session at the ACS Fall 2022 conference (August 2022), as this comparison perspective is unique and of curiosity within the CINF information professionals group. She will virtually be presenting “Analysis of citation access in chemistry and geosciences theses” on August 23, 2022 and “Online access to geochemistry bibliographic citations” on August 21, 2022 and August 22, 2022 as part of the CINF sessions at the ACS Fall 2022 conference.       

Since 1998, Wild has been writing and presenting about cost-free access to geosciences data, tables, figures and citations. She has summarized freely accessible geosciences citations and publications in “Online Bibliographic Sources in Hydrology,”Bibliography on the Occurrence and Intrusion of Saltwater in Aquifers along the Atlantic Coast of the United States,” 

 “On-line access to geoscience bibliographic citations,” Society News in August 2012 issue of Elements and “Introduction to Finding and Accessing Bibliographic Information” in “Review and Interpretation of Previous Work and New Data on the Hydrogeology of the Schwartzwalder Uranium Mine and Vicinity, Jefferson County, Colorado.” She has been providing instructional webinars online since 2012, which are summarized in her Libguide. 

Wild said, “I look forward to working with visiting chemists this summer as part of the Department of Chemistry student and faculty programs, to understand additional issues of access at their institutions and how we can all work together to provide easily accessible information for chemistry students and researchers.”

Published on July 15, 2022

Media Contact: Barbara Valenza, Director of Library Communications