It is kept in the Reference area in Folsom Library, under Call Number REF Q199 J68, and is also available online for 2000 onward. Library subscriptions to chemistry journals cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per journal per year. Internet sites and search engines such as Yahoo and Lycos will not find these primary source articles. Books with good information on the types and structure of chemical literature include How to find chemical information by Maizell, and Chemical information sources by Wiggins. The total number of articles in the CAS databases to the end of 1999 was over 19 million.
Coverage is worldwide, and multilingual, although English-language articles predominate.
Without this specialized Indexing, retrieving articles relevant to your research needs would be more difficult. One very important feature of CAS products is the CAS Registry Number. The CAS Registry System is an international resource for chemical substance identification for scientists, industry, and regulatory bodies, and is the largest file of substance information in the world containing structures and chemical names. The Registry has become the worldwide authority for chemical substance identification. CAS Registry Numbers are unique identifiers that bridge the many differences in systematic, generic, proprietary, and trivial names, linking them with the correct molecular structure.