In the present article, we outline a simple scheme for generating configura
tion interaction matrix elements for spin-orbit interactions in molecules.
The procedure leads to a close parallelism with spin-free permutation-group
approaches. Unitary shift operators were successfully used on the orbital
space to generate the matching permutations necessary to evaluate the requi
red matrix elements. The procedure is adequately illustrated using examples
. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.