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One of the things chemistry is known for is creating very long names. Acronyms offer a solution, but sometimes at the expense of clarity. Today stop on our continuing tour of free chemistry databases and Web services takes us to Acronyms, a service focused on answering one simple question: what does this chemical abbreviation stand for?

From the about page:

This list of common acronyms contains more than 800 acronyms of chemical substances or fragments which have been collected from about 100 chemical journals. In view of the thousands of acronyms devised by authors in the chemical literature, this list is certainly not comprehensive, but it is useful for the identification of the more common abbreviations.

Acronyms is organized around the association between a chemical acronym and a chemical substance, structure fragment, or process. The service can be used either through a search interface in which the acronym (or an acronym fragment) is entered, or through alphabetically arranged index in which acronyms can be browsed by starting letter.

I found the service extremely easy to use and was able to locate many chemical acronym I've come to know and love, including such favorites as BARF, BINAP, AIBN, THF, TMEDA, and DABCO.

One area in which Acronyms does not seem to perform well is with locating the numerous phosphine ligands developed in the last few decades. For example I was unable to find DuPHOS, DPPF, or DIOP. It turned out that the latter was located with a substring search.

If an acronym you're looking for doesn't appear in their search results, a feedback form offers the opportunity to suggest it be added.

Acronyms, offered by publisher FIZ CHEMIE Berlin, is yet another good example of how good scientific marketing can actually be useful. The next time you find yourself drawing a blank when encountering a cryptic four letter abbreviation in chemistry, consider using Acronyms.

Kudos

• Simple, focused interface for searching and browsing.
• Large collection of useful acronyms.

Ideas for Improvement

• Make it easier to submit a new acronym through a dedicated form rather than a general-purpose e-mail contact form.
• Implement auto complete for the search field.
• Use substring searching by default (so, for example, 'DIOP' will return a usable result). Rank direct hits at the top and substring matches below.
• Link results to external sources such as PubChem, Wikipedia, eMolecules, or ChemSpider.
• Make it easy to bookmark, share, and link to acronyms by giving each acronym a dedicated page.