Specifically our studies have been directed along the following lines:nThree thousand structural formulas were provided for encoding by the Chemical Abstracts editorial office from Section 10 of that journal. Nine participants were s elected to take part in the operations-three practicing chemists, three graduate students, and three under¬graduate students. All persons encoded 1,000 compounds by each of the two notation systems. The results of this encoding effort were then analyzed for the following purposes:to determine the number and nature of errors committed} to determine the rules violated in the commission of these errors; to evaluate the ease with which chemists, graduate students in chemistry, and undergraduates in chemistry were able to learn and use the systems; to detect ambiguities and uncertainties in the rules of the system; to study the clarity of presentation of the rules as formulated in the manuals for each system; to determine the rate at which these persons could encode structures by each system; and to study these results in the light of the comments of these persons, who had no previous experience with these notation systems.nAccording to data obtained, neither notation system enjoys a significant advantage over the other insofar as accuracy of encoding is concerned. From checking the accuracy of the nine participants, the Wiswesser codes were found to be correct in 46.6% of the cases, the Dyson ciphers in U2.6£. In view of the low value of the figures for both systems, the difference of 4.0% is not considered meaningful.
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