Teaching Chemical Information:
Tips and Techniques

— June 1997 —

Chemical Reaction Searching:
Organic Compounds

Why do reaction searching?

• Reactions are bread-and-butter of organic chemistry.
• Reaction searching is graphical — search is done by specifying graphical structures.
• Can search using a specific substance or a substructure.
• Can specify the role of a substance/substructure — reactant, product, reagent, catalyst, solvent.
• Can specify functional groups.
• Can specify location of reaction site and direction of reaction.
• Results are provided as reaction diagrams.

Examples of reaction databases:

• CASREACT. Chemical Abstracts Service. Organic Chemistry articles, 1985+
• REACCS. Molecular Design, Ltd. MDL file of current literature; entries from Organic Syntheses, Theilheimer’s Synthetic Methods of Chemistry, and Journal of Synthetic Methods.

insert structure searching p. 44–48

Grace Baysinger, Head Librarian and Bibliographer
Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, Stanford University Libraries
graceb@stanford.edu