Increase your creativitybrowse CA

Scientists often tell us how beneficial browsing printed CA is to their research.

Browsing CA increases understanding of a subject.

It also creates opportunities to encounter bits of seemingly unrelated information that could prove vital in forming new conclusions.

Try the intuitive approach

See if this technique for creative CA searching helps you:

Open printed CA at random and flip through the printed pages

Note when your eye catches a little word or structure in an unrelated section

This could be the germ of a new idea or your entrÉe to previously unknown, highly relevant information.

Look for unusual connections

Another useful technique is scanning the hierarchies of CA index names in the Chemical Substance Index to find unusual structural relationships.

Remember: CA index names are built around a "parent,"generally the name of a structural skeleton plus a suffix denoting the principal group.

As you scan the chemical names and index terms in the Chemical Substance Index, note the following:

The index name is inverted so that the parent appears as the first name printed in the index.

Substances with the same structural skeleton are thus arranged near each other in the alphabetically ordered index.

Look carefully at the substances associated together in the hierarchy.

Note what you consider unusual.

It could provide a radically new way of evaluating a stale assumption.

Find out how your substances are named

If you frequently find yourself searching for a particular class of substances, it may be worth your while to learn the CA conventions for naming the members of that class.

Immerse yourself in CA information

Scientists find printed CA to be an invaluable resource when they have a new subject to learn.

Try this:

Read through the relevant detailed CA index terms at a slow pace.

While doing this, you will learn about other subjects and how they related to the one you are researching.

You will thus gain a more diverse picture of the subject.

Scientists say this technique is most successful when searching the printed page because they are not rushed by the sense of urgencythe meter is runningthat grips them when searching by computer.