IUPAC name vs. common name
In articles about chemicals and chemistry, we should use IUPAC chemical nomenclature for chemicals wherever possible, except in article titles, where the common name should be used if different, followed by mention of the IUPAC name.
- IUPAC is overrated :-)
- Essentially, I feel that whereas IUPAC is fine for simple things, or uncommon complicated things, there are good reasons why we give common names to things.
- See my comments here for some more discussion. Iridium77 13:45, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There is also a problem with the zealots extending the meaning of what is a "chemistry" article - see Talk:Global warming (William M. Connolley 17:33, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)).
- If you think IUPAC is bad, try the Chemical Abstracts naming system- they can make any simple chemical name incomprehensible! I think one STRENGTH of IUPAC is its (relative) flexibility- it does still allow some older names to be used, where the CAS system is rigid (it has to be, for the computer's sake). I agree that if there is a common name in widespread use, we should use that as the principal name, with redirects from other names. However we need to take care, as a "common" name to a geologist (such as Blue_stone for copper(II) sulfate) may be something that a chemist (like me) may never have even heard of (until I started reading Wikipedia!). That is probably something that will just evolve, but as long as we agree that the IUPAC name should always be included on the page and as a redirect, it shouldn't be a problem. What we need to avoid at all costs, though, is the use of wrong "systematic" names such as copper (II) sulfate instead of copper(II) sulfate, or 4-hydroxy-2,3-nonenal instead of 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal (see history for 4-hydroxynonenal. These can cause people to miss a page. Even most chemists don't know all of the rules, so it won't be easy, but we need to be careful and also make sure our pages on nomenclature are up to snuff.
- See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemicals for more discussion on this.
- Walkerma 17:37, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
- Does IUPAC use english or american spellings? Would the official title be copper(II) sulphate or copper(II) sulfate. My personal preference would be english but i will agree with what IUPAC says. Gfad1 18:15, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- IUPAC makes its own decisions, it can go either way. The common element name problems are sulfur(IUPAC, US) vs sulphur (UK); Aluminium (IUPAC, UK) vs. Aluminum (US); Caesium (IUPAC, UK) vs. Cesium (US). The UK has been quick to switch to sulfur, the US has been slower to adopt aluminium and caesium.
- I'm not sure if that is neceassarily true, i am not aware of anyone why spells it with an f in england Gfad1 20:19, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Capitalization
The case conventions for chemical names appear to be uncertain: the same chemical will appear on the Web in many different capitalization variations. If we do not have a policy for this, we will lose the possibility for accidental linking, one of the great strengths of Wikipedia.
As far as I can tell, (most?) chemical names are unambiguous, even if all case information is lost by forcing all letters to upper- or lower-case and all space information lost by throwing away spaces (most chemistry databases seem to do this as a pre-processing step for lookups). General Wikipedia rules would then seem to suggest using all-lowercase except where the use uppercase letters is mandatory or conventional; this would seem to suggest that this should require (almost) all chemical names in Wikipedia to be lowercase, except for the first letter where required by grammar.
Obvious exceptions to this rule include chemical names which are or contain acronyms or initialisms, which necessarily should be rendered in capital letters.
However, I've noticed this sort of thing is very common: "e-Aminohexanoic acid". Now, clearly in this case 'e' is a qualifier, and the first letter of the main part of the name is being capitalised. Can we make general rules for this which do not require expert-level knowledge of chemistry just to be able to name a chemical?
Are there official IUPAC rules about this sort of thing? I've seen IUPAC nomenclature documents with both conventions; but the all-lower-case usage appears to be more common. -- The Anome 12:01, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- As far as I know, the IUPAC recommendations (such as those here), make no comment about capitalization of chemical names, despite making excruciatingly detailed comments about things like spacing, punctuation, and the italicization of modifiers. IUPAC explicitly does not make a recommendation about capitalization and the use of full stops in chemical abbreviations, noting that standards on such things vary widely from publication to publication and should be left to the editorial board of each publication to decide.
- In that spirit, it seems to me that chemical names, being common nouns, should not be capitalized, with the exception of modifier letters that are customarily capitalized (N,N-dimethylformamide, (Z)-2-butene, D-glucose, vs. n-propanol, p-toluenesulfonic acid, etc.) Shimmin 17:29, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- IUPAC does however specify how modifier letters should be capitalised, and italicised. Z/E should be capitalised and italicised {(Z)-2-butene}. Atom symbols should have initial caps, and be italicised if referring to an attachment site {N,N-dimethylformamide}. ortho, meta, para, cis, trans should be small and italicised (ditto for shorthand o, m, p). And a load more that are less common.
- All of the papers that I have in front of me at the moment treat the chemical names as common nouns. Iridium77 10:44, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- The ACS Style Guide (2nd edition) specifically recommends (page 85) "Do not capitalize chemical names or nonproprietary drug names unless they are at the beginning of a sentence or are in a title or heading. Insuch cases, capitalize the first letter of the English word, not the locant, stereoisomer descriptor, or positional prefix". This is also repeated on page 235. I am pretty sure this is standard in Europe & Japan too.
Regarding the naming of inorganic compounds, I have scanned in a couple of pages from the original 1960 rules at http://www2.potsdam.edu/walkerma/inorg_naming.pdf. These explain how to name compounds using the Stock system such as iron(II) chloride (rule 2.252). Walkerma 23:08, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There is freely available software available online which allows the naming of organic compounds up to 50 atoms and with certain constraints. Visit http://www.acdlabs.com/download/name.html for details and download the software from http://www.acdlabs.com/download/chemsk.html. This software capitalizes in an appropriate fashion and this may help. Access is available online through a webpage also: http://www.acdlabs.com/ilab/
Capitalization naming convention
I propose the following article naming convention for compounds that start with a prefix or number:
The correct IUPAC nomenclature uppercase chemical name is used as the artcle name. The lowercase correct IUPAC nomenclature name should be made a redirect to the article. (Due to technical limitations the first letter has to be uppercased):
This way a simple wikilink can be used inside a sentence (redirect) and the article names are formally uppercased. Cacycle 21:33, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- Seems good to me. I will try to make sure that List of organic compounds follows this when I do the next big edit on that page. Walkerma 22:36, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Punctuation
Question: What should we do with punctuation around brackets?