LibGuides: Chemistry Courses & Research: Websites

Using The Web For Research

What is it? Why do I care? What does it really say?

You answer these three questions every time you use a source, whether you know it or not.

Whether it is a website or a scholarly journal article...
Whether it is for a 1st-year course or real life...

Start noticing how you answer these questions to ensure your sources are really meeting your needs.

The Three Questions:

What is it: What is the source type and author credibility?
- Quick Wikipedia checks are okay! You can also compare what other source say about that source.
Why do I care: Does the source type and author credibility meet your needs?
- Decide this at the beginning so you know whether to read the material or find something better.
What does it really say: Perceive how the word choices influence the knowledge.
- The author's word choices, included and excluded information, and the aim of the publication all make a difference in how or why you would use a source.

Websites

The following web sites are helpful in locating information about chemical compounds, molecules and elements.

PubChem This link opens in a new window
PubChem mostly contains small molecules, but also larger molecules such as nucleotides, carbohydrates, lipids, peptides, and chemically-modified macromolecules. We collect information on chemical structures, identifiers, chemical and physical properties, biological activities, patents, health, safety, toxicity data, and many others.
PubChem BioAssay This link opens in a new window
Consists of deposited bioactivity data and descriptions of bioactivity tests (assays) used to screen chemical substances with descriptions of the screening conditions and the bioactivity levels readouts.
PubChem Compound This link opens in a new window
Contains validated chemical depiction information provided to describe substances in PubChem Substance. Structures stored within PubChem Compounds are pre-clustered and cross-referenced by identity and similarity groups.

Medline Plus
This web site is created and monitored by the National Institute of Health and the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The content is written in layman's terms so the average American consumer can understand complex health topics.

More Websites

American Chemical Society Publications. Search of the publications of the ACS; limited full-text but a wealth of citations.

Energy Citations Database. Access to citations and full-text articles from 1943-present in an array of science fields.

NASA. National Aeronautucs and Space Administration.

PubChem: provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is a component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. PubChem is organized as three linked databases within the NCBI's Entrez information retrieval system. These are PubChem Substance, PubChem Compound, and PubChem BioAssay. PubChem also provides a fast chemical structure similarity search tool.

Science.gov. Gateway to a large selection of websites, narrowed by topic.

Science Research: A free, publicly available deep web search engine that uses advanced "federated search technology" to return high quality results by submitting your search query - in real-time - to other well respected search engines then collating, ranking and dropping duplicates of the results.

Science Watch. Allows you to follow current trends and research in chemistry.

World Wide Science. Gateway to national and international scientific databases.