Research Guide for Materials Science: Home

ChemSpider is a free service providing access to millions of chemical structures and integration to a multitude of other online services. ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

Alternative name: Pub Chem

PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules.

PubChem Compound: Search unique chemical structures using names, synonyms or keywords. Links to available biological property information are provided for each compound.

PubChem Substance: Search deposited chemical substance records using names, synonyms or keywords. Links to biological property information and depositor web sites are provided.

PubChem BioAssay: Search bioassay records using terms from the bioassay description, for example "cancer cell line". Links to active compounds and bioassay results are provided.

Structure Search: Search PubChem's Compound database using a chemical structure as the query. Structures may be sketched or specified by SMILES, MOL files, or other formats.

Alternative names: Innovation from Crossfire Beilstein ; Beilstein and Gmelin

Reaxys has extensive coverage of quality, authoritative information in organic, inorganic and organometalic chemistry.

The merger of three prestigious databases puts all the relevant data together. A search across the Reaxys database delivers a single results set and each record provides details excerpted from multiple patent or journal sources.

The Beilstein Database

Based on Beilstein's Handbuch der organischen Chemie, the Beilstein Database covers organic chemistry from 1771 to date. The BS0103 release (made available in September 2001) contains over 8.2 million structures, 10 million reactions (making it the world's largest reactions database), 20 million property records and 50 million hyperlinks. The Beilstein Database also contains the Beilstein CrossFire Abstracts Database, which contains over 600,000 original author abstracts from 1980-present.

The Gmelin Database

The Gmelin Database is the sister database to Beilstein, covering inorganic and organometallic compounds from 1772 to (presently) 1995. Again based on a German publication, the Gmelin Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie, the database currently comprises over 1.5 million compounds, including glasses, alloys, ceramics, minerals and coordination compounds, and 1.3 million reactions.

Alternative name: Sci Finder Scholar

SciFinder on the Web is a research discovery tool that allows you to explore the world’s literature in Chemistry and related scientific disciplines including biochemistry, biomedical sciences, chemical engineering, materials science, pharmacology, agriculture, etc. The CAS information service indexes and abstracts information from more than 10000 major scientific journals, 57 patent authorities around the world, conference proceedings, technical reports, etc and produces the following databases:

CAplus (Scientific Literature and Patents)

CAS REGISTRY (Chemical Substances)

CASREACT (Reactions)

CHEMCATS (Chemical Catalogs)

CHEMLIST (Regulated Chemicals)

MARPAT (Markush Structures)

Scopus is a bibliographic database for science, medicine and some social sciences. It covers 15,000 journals from 4,000 publishers worldwide, providing access to over 33 million abstracts going back as far as 1869.

It includes the content from a number of other major databases: Medline (medicine) 1966 - , Embase (medicine) 1970 - , Compendex (engineering) 1970 - , Geobase (geography) 1980 - .

SPIE (the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) aims to advance light-based technologies. The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive resource available on optics and photonics, and includes all papers published since 1962 in SPIE's peer-reviewed journals, more than 350 ebooks with 25 new titles added annually, and 10,500+ volumes of SPIE conference proceedings

Alternative name: Springer Materials
SpringerMaterials is the most comprehensive platform on materials data, providing information on more than 290,000 materials, over 3,000 properties, and their applications. It offers access to major materials science data sources including the Landolt-Börnstein book series, and other specialized materials science databases.

Please note that access to the 2019/2020 content will be available until 31st December 2020.

Alternative names: WoK ; WoS ; Web of Knowledge. Provides access to and cross-searching of databases in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, social sciences and humanities. It includes Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Data Citation Index. Also provides access to Journal Citation Reports for sciences and social sciences.