In the Compendex database, some titles and abstracts name chemical elements and compounds by their chemical symbols. These formulas may include subscripts and punctuation. Because of the variety of formats and transcriptions, searching on chemical elements is not reliable. We do not recommend searching chemical symbols in this database.
If you do search chemical symbols, beware that you are not retrieving all relevant citations, only those that happen to have the chemical symbol in the title or abstract. These searches succeed only on two-or-more-element compounds without embedded subscripts or punctuation.
| Sample Keyword Search | Comments |
| agcd | Finds silver cadmium alloys (AgCd), both with and without subscripts on Cd. Does not find silver cadmium alloys that have a subscript on Ag. |
| agcd$ | Finds silver-cadmium (without subscripts) that may have additional elements following Cd (such as AgCdO). |
| $agcd$ | Finds silver-cadmium (without subscripts) that may have elements preceding Ag and/or following Cd; this search takes a significant amount of time. |
| ag$ | Not recommended. Finds compounds starting with silver, but also finds all words in the database that start with the letters “ag”. Too many results to be useful. |
August 2001