Blog CSD

We started 2020 with a lot of excitement and expectations. After all, we had just achieved a major milestone with the millionth structure in our database, and an additional 60K entries by the end of 2019. We were all geared up with new strategies and plans to tackle the data that would start pouring in in 2020. And yes, we did have a lovely busy start. Little did we know 2020 had plans which none of us could have fathomed. By early March it was "crystal" clear that 2020 had made up its mind to make things difficult for all of us!

It’s a new year and we are planning our CSD Improvements for the upcoming year. Some of us may have already broken our resolutions (oops), but here at CCDC we have resolved to keep improving the database in 2021.

As we kick off the new year, we are delighted to announce the launch of a new workflow with the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) aimed at improving the accessibility of structural data. This initiative forms part of our overall strategy to improve structural data publication processes and ensure data is seamlessly made available through the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). ACS Publications are a key partner for us and the workflow has already been successfully adopted by Crystal Growth & Design,  Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Letters, Organometallics and more recently The Journal of Organic Chemistry (JOC).

This is the first blog in our CSD Educators series and I am delighted to introduce Greg Ferrence - @FerrenceG - from Illinois State University. In our CSD Educators series we will be hearing from lecturers and teachers about some of their experiences in education and their journey to using the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).  We wanted Greg to launch this series because not only has he used the CSD at his institution, but he has helped the CCDC shape our own educational resources and if that wasn’t enough he is currently doing a virtual sabbatical with us. We asked Greg to tell us about how he has used structural data to help inspire a new generation of scientists, his long standing collaboration with the CCDC and his journey to having a guest editor slot on our popular #FeaturedStructureFriday social media campaign.

We are delighted to announce that this week we launched a new workflow with The Journal of Organic Chemistry (JOC) to improve the processing of CIF files between the journal and the CCDC. This initiative has been possible through our continued partnership with ACS Publications and is a natural extension to the workflow that was successfully adopted by Crystal Growth & Design in 2016, and Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Letters, and Organometallics in 2017.

Since a pandemic was declared nearly 6 months ago we have been closely monitoring what impact this has had for our users, depositors and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). We thought it was about time we shared some of our observations and hopefully give you some positive news for a change.

We are pleased to announce the August 2020 data update of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is now available! This third data update of the year brings you an additional 12,269 new structures (12,694 new database entries) and increases the total size of the CSD to over 1,060,000 structures (1,080,000 entries), with 27,298 entries from journal articles published in 2020.

The recent cover of Chemical Science (issue 32) showcased a paper by Moghadam et al. highlighting our new approach to classifying MOF structures for better searching and high-throughput screening.

Last week we were delighted to learn that Dr Olga Kennard had been awarded the twelfth IUCr Ewald Prize for her invaluable pioneering contribution to the development of crystallographic databases, namely the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).

We are pleased to announce the May 2020 data update of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is now available!  This data update brings you 10,188 new structures (10,697 new entries) and increases the total size of the CSD to over 1,048,000 structures (1,067,000 entries).