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enCIFer User Guide
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For most purposes, it is necessary to edit into the CIF those additional data items that are needed for
archival purposes, or for transmission of the CIF to a colleague, journal or database. These data items
might include authors’ names and addresses, chemical or physical data, such as chemical compound
names, the melting point, etc.
Some journals permit the text of the manuscript to be incorporated into the CIF using specific data
names. The CIF standard includes support for simple typesetting features such as subscripts,
superscripts and cosequences of multiple ASCII characters (digraphs or trigraphs) to express non-
Roman characters, mathematical symbols etc.
If a CIF is amended or enhanced by manual editing, it is quite easy to destroy the integrity of the CIF
format, so that it cannot be parsed and interpreted by the many programs (structure validation
software, structure visualisers, etc.) that are now designed to read CIF data. It is because of these
pitfalls in manual editing that the enCIFer program has been written.
1.6 Depositing CIFs with Journals and the CCDC
Nearly all journals now expect or require that crystal structure data associated with published papers
shall be deposited in CIF format. Authors should consult the Notes for Authors for their chosen
journal to see their most recent arrangements for depositing CIF data.
Many major journals have arrangements with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, whereby
the CIF is deposited with the CCDC before the paper is submitted for publication. The CCDC
supplies a CCDC Deposition Number and authors include this number in their submitted manuscript.
This number is printed in the published paper and is stored in the Cambridge Structural Database,
where it affords a valuable link to electronic versions of the journal, and allows scientists to request
individual datasets free of charge from the CCDC.
The CCDC also accepts Private Communications to the CSD, i.e. crystal structures for which formal
journal publication is not envisaged. The data will be checked and evaluated before inclusion in the
CSD, and any problems clarified with the depositor. The author(s) name(s) and contact address will
be included in the CSD.
Full details about CIF deposition to the CCDC, for both journal publications and for private
communications, can be found on the CCDC website at www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk.