Teaching Chemical Information:
Tips and Techniques

— March 1998 —

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