Blog CSD Communications

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.

Data comes to us in many shapes and forms (or formats) and you might find it surprising but some of the deposits we get still occasionally come via post rather than via our online deposition process or email. But what good comes from the paper copies for the users of our electronic database?

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 2020.2 CSD Release includes another 12,000+ CSD entries since the last data update in June and takes the total size of the CSD to over 1.08 million entries. Whilst this impressive rate of growth is testament to the ongoing efforts of scientists around the world, who publish and share the outcomes of their research with the community, the sheer size and diversity of structures in the CSD can be somewhat daunting.

To help researchers investigate insights into particular categories of compounds, the 2020.2 CSD Release has extended the range of available subsets, with new lists of structures focused on drugs, pesticides and those structures that have been highlighted as being of interest in the fight against COVID-19. These new CSD subsets add to the existing subsets that include ‘best representative’ lists for statistical analysis of the CSD, subsets of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and CSD entries containing information on atomic anisotropic displacement parameters (ADPs; otherwise known as thermal ellipsoids).

In recent years, we have noticed an increase in the number of structures deposited to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) that are measured with electron diffraction techniques. As of the beginning of 2020, approximately 50 electron structures have been added to the CSD. Since this field of research is rapidly developing, we thought it timely to investigate all the electron studies in the database to ensure they can be easily located and have worked to identify any structures that were missed during the initial data curation process.

This poster explores the process and benefits of CSD Communications - the simple way to share crystallographic data without the need for an accompanying paper.

The CSD - The world’s essential database of crystal structures

After celebrating the huge milestone for structural chemistry with the addition of the millionth structure into the CSD in June 2019, the 2020.0 CSD Release now contains 1,034,174 entries and 1,016,168 unique structures. That means an increase of more than 60,000 entries, and we are well on our way to the next million!

Our fourth CSD Hero is Frank Fronczek, currently 7^th in our annual CSD author statistics. 

Frank Fronczek is Director of the X-ray Facility at Louisiana State University and a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association.  He was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley after receiving his PhD at Caltech, with Dick Marsh (trained by Linus Pauling) and Bill Schaefer.(1) 

We would like to thank Frank by highlighting some of his key contributions to the CSD.

In recent years, CSD Communications has grown to be one of the most popular methods for publishing structural data among the crystallographic community with more than 15,000 CSD Communications published in the last 5 years and 28,000 published overall since the 1980s. This represents a formidable amount of structural data which without CSD Communications may never have been made available to the scientific community. To promote the benefits which this wealth of crystallographic data can offer to the research community, the CCDC has therefore recently been working to make CSD Communications more convenient to publish, access and cite.