The data items normally present in a CIF, including details of authors and journal, though not all items are necessarily included in an entry
in the Cambridge Structural Database. Structure factors will not be retained by the CCDC.
CIF (Crystallographic Information File) is a standard means of information interchange in crystallography,
sponsored by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).
For the original paper describing the CIF standard please see:
The Crystallographic Information File (CIF): a New Standard Archive File for Crystallography, S. R. Hall, F. H. Allen and I. D. Brown. Acta Cryst. (1991). A47, 655-685.
Guidelines for the preparation and editing of a CIF, the data items required therein, standard data
codes and keywords, CIF templates, example CIFs, and data validation criteria and procedures are available via the IUCr CIF help page.
The CCDC program enCIFer provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface to facilitate the editing and validation of CIFs and enables information to be
added safely to a CIF without corrupting the strict syntax. enCIFer is available to the scientific community free of charge for bona fide research purposes.
If a CIF is not available, please contact
to discuss other possible formats. However, most major journals now require cifs and the notes for authors should be consulted.
If your paper is rejected by the journal to which it has been submitted and you resubmit to another
journal, then please keep us informed of the change of journal name and the progress of your
publication. (email
).
In this case, it is not necessary to supply a new CIF. A new CIF would only be required if the
data have been revised.
If your paper is rejected and you have not resubmitted to another journal, then we will store your
data in our confidential archive and await publication. Within about a year, we will contact you
to find out if publication is still in progress or if you would prefer us to enter your structure
into the CSD as a Private Communication.
Yes. Send the revised data to
, giving the CCDC deposition number and/or the
original journal reference for the old data. We will overwrite the old data with the new and you
will keep the same CCDC deposition number. However, if the original data have been subsequently published,
then the revised CIF will be allocated a new CCDC deposition number.
"CCDC nnnnnn contains the supplementary crystallographic data for this paper. These data can be obtained free of
charge from The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre via www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/data_request/cif."
Yes. We always appreciate receiving a copy of your data. The deposition should include the list of
authors and the full journal reference. If it duplicates data we already have, we will thank you and simply discard the duplicate data.
Authors occasionally find that data are missing from their structures in the CSD and we are glad to
include their data in the next release of the CSD. An electronic or printed copy of the journal
article is welcome, especially for the less-common journals.
Data deposition notes are available for journal editors on what is required when setting up a scheme for depositing crystallographic data with the CCDC.
If you are interested in setting up a journal deposition scheme with the CCDC, please contact:
The deposition number cited in the paper, eg. CCDC 299839, CCDC 600123, CSD 408279, CCDC 182/1520, etc.
The full journal citation
The CCDC will then send to you by email the structure(s), in CIF format, which match your request.
We will usually reply to your request within 3 working days.
If you do not have all the required information for the CIF Request Form please complete the form as far
as possible, providing any additional information which may help us to locate the structure(s).
