QUICK BOOK REVIEW - Chemical Information Mining: Facilitating Literature-Based Discovery

Chemical Information Mining: Facilitating Literature-Based Discovery
Ed. Debra L. Banville
CRC Press
QD 8.5 C475 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4200-7649-3 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-4200-7649-3 (alk. paper)

 Strengths
1.       Covers a fairly broad area
2.       Describes problems not obvious to chemists
3.       Contains the names of many online programs and software for chemical information mining
4.       Well-referenced and readable by chemists
5.       Semantic web, natural language processing, optical character recognition (OCR)

Weaknesses
1.       Written largely from information and computer science perspectives
2.       Book chapters by different authors makes the book not so much a teaching book

As a chemist, I would use this book for
1.       Learning about software programs available for accessing chemical information from                              literature: publications, patents or images.
2.       Learning about methods used in different areas of chemistry for searching information
3.       Learning how to structure my own chemical information in order to streamline searching