PN Prime Name of Substance

benzene- in pn

benzene in pn

methyl-ethyl-ketone- in pn

1234 tetrachloro in pn

1-chloro-2-propanol in pn

gamma-carotene in pn

In general this field contains the common name of the substance. If it is not possible to allocate a precise chemical name (i.e. if the substance is of unknown or variable composition, or consists of complex reaction products or biological materials), a short phrase appears instead; e.g. "Chlorinated paraffins (C12, 60%)". This field is always present in DOSE records.

Each word that appears in the PN field is searchable separately. All parts of common and chemical names, including parent, substituents, modifiers, and locants are individually or collectively searchable, as in the above examples.

As mentioned in the section on character set and indexing, the only searchable (and indexable) characters in the whole of the database are a-z (regardless of case), 0-9, the hyphen and - depending on the particular field - the full stop (this applies to searching as a whole). The full-stop is a searchable character in this field. Do NOT include commas, colons, apostrophes, + characters, etc. in your search statement. Also, parentheses, curly and square brackets should be replaced by spaces in searches. Greek characters should first be translated to their equivalent English words before searching. This translation of Greek characters to words takes place throughout the database, not only in this field.

Some entries in the PN field will have been hyphenated prior to indexing to enhance retrieval. For example, all single-word names are indexed with a terminal hyphen, to ease retrieval of the word. Adding a hyphen to the end of a single word allows you to search only for that word, rather than the word and all possible suffixes. The search benzene in pn will always result in more than one record, all containing the word "benzene". On the other hand, by searching with the hyphen you will obtain a single record. Hyphenation has only been applied to names originally containing just letters and spaces. The presence of punctuation, brackets, hyphens and numbers obviates the need for hyphenation.

It is strongly recommended that you employ the technique of lateral searching when searching for long, complex names or parts of names from the records display area or free text index. Apart from saving you keystrokes, the retrieval software will ensure that the phrase is correctly presented to the search engine. For more information on searching from the index in DOSE, see the index searching section.

It is usually best to search on the Name Fragments field (ZNF) (which combines both the Prime Name and Synonyms (SY) fields) if you are not sure whether the name you are using is actually in the Prime Name field.