Stanford University Libraries

Introduction

STN International®, the scientific and technical information network, is offered cooperatively by the American Chemical Society, FIZ Karlsruhe, and The Japan Information Center for Science and Technology (JICST). STN® provides customers around the world with easy and direct access to the world’s foremost scientific and technical databases. The goal of STN is to serve the information needs of the worldwide scientific community.

The REGISTRY File is one of the many databases available on STN. Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS®) produces this database, which currently contains over 12 million chemical substance records including over 17 million names. Between 8,000 and 14,000 records are added each week. These records contain many fields including CAS Registry Numbers, chemical names (trade names and systematic names), molecular formulas, and structures. You can search for substance information using Registry Numbers, names, name fragments, molecular formulas, and structures.

You may search for information in any STN database using an online command language called Messenger®, which has 27 commands. You can effectively search with just the few basic commands covered in this booklet.