Chemical Abstracts service centennial: Facts and figures

The history of the emergence and development of the abstracting journal Chemical Abstracts is considered starting from its first printed issue up to the present time. At present, the well-known Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) offers a wide range of information resources, including such massive databases (databases) as: CA/CAPlus (∼27 million abstracts), the CAS Registry (∼31 million organic and inorganic substances [compounds], ∼58 million biological sequences), CASREACT (∼13 million organic [chemical] reactions), CHEMCATS (∼14 million entries of commercially available chemicals and their suppliers), CHEMLIST (∼245 thousand high-priority industrial chemicals, their storage and transportation regulations [restrictions]), MARPAT (the CAS Markush database containing the keys to generic substances in patents), as well as specialty-specific [subject-oriented] issues of CA SELECT, the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI) list of journals, and many others. Information retrieval systems are presented that provide access to CAS databases, viz., the STN International and SciFinder.