This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Inorganic Crystal Structure Database | |
|---|---|
| Name | Inorganic Crystal Structure Database |
| Type | Bibliographic and structural database |
| Owner | Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe / FIZ Karlsruhe |
| Launched | 1978 |
| Country | Germany |
Inorganic Crystal Structure Database The Inorganic Crystal Structure Database is a curated bibliographic and structural resource documenting inorganic crystalline materials, crystal structures, and associated metadata. It aggregates peer-reviewed crystallographic determinations from journals, conference proceedings, and institutional reports to support research in materials science, solid-state chemistry, and condensed matter physics. Major users include universities, national laboratories, and industrial research centers engaged with crystallography, mineralogy, and materials engineering.
The database compiles crystallographic data for inorganic compounds, providing unit-cell parameters, space groups, atomic coordinates, and bibliographic citations. Prominent institutions that interact with the resource include FIZ Karlsruhe, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It complements other resources such as Cambridge Structural Database, Protein Data Bank, Materials Project, NIST, and ICSD‑like repositories used by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Max Planck Society, and École Polytechnique. The dataset is used alongside analytical tools from Microsoft Research, Google Research, IBM Research, and software like VASP, Quantum ESPRESSO, CRYSTAL (program), and SHELX.
The project originated at German research organizations with technical partnerships involving FIZ Karlsruhe and international collaborators from Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and national libraries. Early contributors included crystallographers affiliated with University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, ETH Zurich, and University of California, Berkeley. Over decades, dataset expansion reflected advances at facilities such as Diamond Light Source, SOLEIL, Spring-8, and Argonne National Laboratory. Development milestones intersected with standards from International Union of Crystallography, software progress from Bruker Corporation, and digitization efforts at Library of Congress and Bundesarchiv.
Entries cover binary, ternary, and more complex inorganic phases, minerals studied at Smithsonian Institution, oxides examined at Los Alamos National Laboratory, halides characterized at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and intermetallics reported by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. The repository links to publications in journals such as Acta Crystallographica, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Nature Materials, Science (journal), and Physical Review Letters. Coverage includes space groups referenced in resources from the International Tables for Crystallography and classifications used by American Mineralogist and Mineralogical Society of America. Contributors span institutes like Royal Institution, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and National Institute for Materials Science.
Access models involve institutional subscriptions and site licenses negotiated between providers and universities such as Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Tokyo, and consortia like European Research Council. Licensing terms reflect agreements with publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. Commercial vendors and software integrators, including Elsevier ScienceDirect and Clarivate Analytics, have interoperable arrangements for metadata exchange with corporate research groups at BASF, Siemens, Dow Chemical Company, and General Electric.
The schema encodes crystallographic metadata aligned with standards from the International Union of Crystallography, using conventions from Crystallographic Information Framework and mappings compatible with FAIR principles promoted by European Commission initiatives. Records contain bibliographic fields consistent with indexing by CrossRef, citation metadata used by Web of Science, and DOI resolution practices aligned with International DOI Foundation. Validation workflows reference symmetry databases curated in collaboration with researchers at University of Manchester and software tools maintained by Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
Researchers in solid-state chemistry at University of California, Santa Barbara and computational materials scientists at Argonne National Laboratory use the database for structure prediction, phase diagram construction, and high-throughput screening tied to projects at Energy Materials Centre and Materials Genome Initiative. Industrial R&D groups at Toyota Research Institute, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and IBM apply the data for catalyst design, battery electrode optimization, and semiconductor development. Educational use occurs in crystallography courses at Imperial College London and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while geoscientists at US Geological Survey and Geological Survey of Japan consult entries for mineral identification.
Critiques center on coverage biases favoring well-studied motifs and journals, interoperability hurdles with open repositories such as arXiv, and licensing restrictions affecting smaller institutions and researchers in regions served by UNESCO initiatives. Users note challenges in integrating legacy data from older publications archived at British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Technical limitations include varying completeness of coordinate sets, provenance metadata gaps compared with resources like Protein Data Bank, and occasional discrepancies resolved by cross-checks with datasets from NIST and independent crystallographic studies at Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
Category:Crystallography databases