Wikipedia talk:Notability (chemicals)

Revive this proposal

This is failed proposal but we should try to bring this back. I have started making edits. WikiProject Chemicals has been notified of this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemicals#Revival of the page Wikipedia:Notability (chemicals).

The active chemicals editors no longer believe that simply having a CAS number is enough for a chemical to be notable. There are millions of possible organic compounds that have CAS numbers. For a chemical to be notable, it should be in secondary sources (books and chemistry reviews). There is still the question of how extensively it needs to be covered in the sources to be non-trivial.

Only problem with this requirement is that chemical reviews often only discuss the applications of a final product; they rarely mention chemical intermediates that may be important in the synthesis of the final product, even if that intermediate appears in dozens of primary sources. We can discuss if a chemical intermediate could be considered notable if it is used to synthesize the final products that appear in reviews (i.e. the review cites primary sources that contain that chemical intermediate).

Another question is if a PubChem or ChemSpider entry (technically tertiary sources) makes a compound notable. I have added a proposal for this in the page: While databases such as PubChem and ChemSpider are technically tertiary sources containing entries for millions of chemical compounds, these entries are considered trivial if no properties are given beyond the bare basics for an entry (name, structure, formula, database numbers, and computed properties). Michael7604 (talk) 19:46, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I would say no to PubChm and Chemspider as any evidence of notability, as they list speculative and erroneous entries as well as those very low in publication. "primary" has a different slant to articles about people, where primary sources are written by the subject. This does not apply to chemicals. Also chemical review articles are often written by one person, or perhaps the same team of people that wrote the original research on the chemicals. So I would propose that it is not restrticted to chemicals in reviews, but also allow chemicals written about by independent authors in reliable publications. This is possible as many chemical "primary" research articles contain a mini review in the introduction about prior research and its relevance to the current publication.

Also it would be wise to warn against articles on chemicals that don't exist. Some were errors at the start, and some are speculation or computational / first principal studies. These topics should ahve a higher bar to entry here so as not to mislead our readers. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:31, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Another question is if chemical intermediates (typically only mentioned in supporting information and not in the main article) can be considered a notable non-trivial mention if they are only included in the experimental steps in the supporting information of a primary source. In a way these are also like a mini-review since the synthesis procedures in supporting information come from previous research. In that case there could be hundreds of primary sources to choose from, so it's best to select only those cited in reviews. Michael7604 (talk) 20:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)