Powered in large part by undergraduate students from community colleges, in 2020 the Inkpen group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC) began work to establish and maintain the Molecular Junction Database (MJD), targeted as a free, web-based, publicly accessible search tool containing details relating to every molecular junction that has ever been studied (single-molecule and large area). At present, there is no mechanism to survey this data quickly. The increasing rate of scientific publication also makes it challenging to keep up with the field and easy to miss important publications. To lower these barriers to finding relevant information, our ultimate goal is to build and maintain a comprehensive, up-to-date database that is searchable by simple string-based queries (author, title, year of publication), in addition to exact and sub-structure searching using cheminformatics webtools. This multi-year project requires the identification and indexing of a steadily increasing number of relevant papers, and significant website development for database management and the facilitation of information discovery.
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We have made significant progress towards our project goals through an extension of USC Chemistry's long-standing collaboration with the Department of Chemistry at Cerritos College, Norwalk, CA. This new joint venture grew out of a need created by social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, where, in Fall 2020, Cerritos Professor Jeff Bradbury sought to implement a meaningful virtual 2nd year general chemistry lab experience. Together, we developed an online educational plan to train his undergraduate class to mine literature data for the MJD. This plan aimed to advance student knowledge of molecular chemistry, cheminformatics, and the process of scientific publication and research, also exposing students to a range of field-specific topics (scanning tunneling microscopy, self-assembled monolayers) they would not have typically encountered. Access to legal articles for indexing was a potentially serious stumbling block, but after contacting the American Chemical Society (ACS) they generously volunteered to provide free subscription access for their ACS All-Pubs package (including J. Am. Chem. Soc., Nano Lett., J. Phys. Chem.) to the entire Cerritos College community between August 2021-December 2021. Between Fall 2020 and Summer 2021, 104 Cerritos students indexed >1,500 total articles (~5,000 junctions). In tandem, several undergraduate students at USC undertook virtual research projects to validate and standardize Cerritos data and build the foundation of a web search interface.
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We are continuing work on the MJD through a number of different initiatives, and are pursuing the phased launch of a searchable database and website with accompanying educational materials over the coming years.
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We are grateful to the following organizations for their generous support of the MJD Project:
