Research Guides: CHEM 398: Professional Practices and Perspectives: Home

Main Tools

PubChem Compound
Free source with assembled information about compounds from a variety of sources -- ranging from user-submitted information to vetted, well-regarded sources. PubChem Compund is useful for looking up basic information about a compound and for getting citations that link out to other sources of information about that compound.
ChemSpider
Crowdsourced collection of chemical structures with links to books and research articles on compounds, supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

CHEMnetBASE
A collection of chemical and chemical-related dictionaries, including the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Quick search function allows users to perform searches on chemical terms and structures simultaneously across the entire database.

Scifinder
Aside from being useful for locating research articles in all areas of chemistry, it has property and reaction information for molecules and allows you to search by structure.
Web of Science
Citation databases that can be searched by topic and that has connections between sources, including journal articles and conference papers, that cite each other. It includes searches by cited reference as well as regular searches by keywords, title, and author.
PubMed
PubMed is the primary database for locating research articles in medicine, health and biology. Although using PubMed to discover articles is free, go through VCU Libraries and use Get It @ VCU to access the full text of subscription (non-free) articles.
Reaxys
Aside from its use to locate properties and to locate research articles, Reaxys especially useful for synthetic chemistry and can be used to build multi-step syntheses and to compare expected yields from alternative syntheses.

ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication
Online style guide with information on writing in science, including a chapters on citing sources using ACS citation styles and on ethics in scientific writing and publication.
Citation Tools
Find out about using Mendeley, Zotero, or Endnote to manage citations and create bibliographies
CASSI, Chemistry Journal Abbreviation Lookup
Tool to find the CAS abbreviation for journal titles or find the title of a journal from an abbreviation.

Chemistry Research Guide
How Do I...Tools for smarter research
A collection of learning tools designed to increase your research skills.