Blog WebCSD

We are pleased to announce that the February 2021 data update of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is now available! This data update is available to users of our CSD software portfolio bringing you 20,058 new structures (20,698 new entries) and increasing the total size of the CSD to over 1.1 million structures.

Last week, the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) has passed a total of 1,100,000 unique crystal structures within the database, marking the first milestone on the way to 2,000,000 structures! It wasn’t too long ago we were celebrating reaching 1 million structures (just 20 months!) and despite a year of global challenges and difficulties we are excited to start 2021 with this new achievement. A massive thank you to everyone who has contributed, not only to this feat, but to the continual growth of the CSD.

We are delighted to announce the alpha release of a new CSD Sketcher as part of WebCSD, our online access to the CSD. Whilst you can continue to use the existing features of WebCSD for your research, we hope you’ll take the opportunity to try our new Sketcher and give us feedback on its future development.

Data comes to us in many shapes and forms (or formats) and you might find it surprising but some of the deposits we get still occasionally come via post rather than via our online deposition process or email. But what good comes from the paper copies for the users of our electronic database?

As we described earlier in the year, alongside our Access Structures/WebCSD system we launched a WebCSD Ideas voting page where you can log in and identify which features you’d most like to see added or improved in the interface. We're continuing to prioritise improvements to WebCSD directly driven by your input and feedback in this voting page and in person when we meet you at events. We launched the first of these directly user-driven improvements (full screen 3D viewer) earlier in 2018 and two more are now available in WebCSD (formula searching and structure search templates).

Alongside our web interface to access the CSD (Access Structures/WebCSD) we recently launched a web page where you can log in and vote on what features you’d like to see added or improved in the interface. The first of these directly user-driven improvements via the WebCSD Ideas voting page is the ability to expand the 3D visualiser to full screen which is now available to all users in our free Access Structures service as well as WebCSD.

We launched the latest version of our CSD web searching interface, WebCSD v2, during the summer of 2017. Since then, we’ve also added a range of new features to the interface including the ability to perform unit cell searches, structural similarity searches and included query highlighting. We’re keen to get further feedback from you, our user community, about the interface and how you think it should be developed in the future.

We are excited to announce a range of new features that have been introduced to WebCSD v2 – unit cell search, similarity search and query highlighting.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of new searching functionality within our CSD web interface for CSD licenced users.