ABSTRACT
The chemical literature is large and varied, crossing many other scientific disciplines. It includes review sources, which summarize past work done in a particular field and are excellent background reading; primary literature, such as research articles in journals; indexes; and abstracts, which help one to find review and primary documents; catalogs for books, chemicals, and equipment; and handbooks, which present values for physical and chemical properties and the references that report them. There are many non-keyword access points to all of the various types of literature. Names, formulae, structures, sequences, and other unique identifiers help chemists to locate compounds, while substructure, reaction, and sequence searching are powerful tools for finding structurally similar substances and their reactivity.
