The Literature(s) of Chemistry

And it really is plural.

In short, there's no easy straightforward foolproof way to find everything you need to be able to find in a realm that's as labyrinthine as Chemistry's literatures. There are tools that can do a lot, but the more powerful they are, the more complex they seem to be. And none of the tools is omniscient. And every day "the literature" swells.

So what is this literature? A lot of it is reports of primary research, published in journals. There are a great many journals in which chemists publish, and (as academics go) chemists publish a lot; nowadays most publications are in English; and almost nobody reads what chemists publish recreationally.

WHY do chemists publish? Partly it's for conventional academic reasons --tenure, promotion, other forms of academic obligation-- but that can't account for most of the volume. A fundamental motivation is to establish priority for a discovery --or, to look at it in a somewhat more romantic light, to add to the edifice of Science, to the moving frontier of human knowledge. Sometimes there's money in it, and the highly specialized world of patents is especially concerned with that prospect.

Whatever. But academic libraries accumulate enormous volumes of paper on which people report the results of research in great detail, and most of it will never be read, except by very small numbers of people who happen to be working on the same thing, and they read because they have to know what others in the same area are up to.

Primary literature

is what such reports of research are called. The main key to finding items in this realm is Chemical Abstracts, which we'll discuss elsewhere.

Review literature

(sometimes called 'secondary' literature) is extremely valuable when one is trying to get up to speed in a particular area: a review article summarizes progress and points to bibliographic resources (usually primary research articles). But how do you find review articles? Some journals publish them, and some annual series do as well, but a single source that indexes the review literature of organic chemistry is difficult to find.

By the way, ChemAbs identifies review articles with an R at the beginning of the abstract number (you'll also see P for patents and B for books).

W&L's periodical holdings in Chemistry

There's a list of current journals, and you can of course search ANNIE (use the Title search, just as you would for a book, but substitute the journal's name). Most of our Chemistry journals are upstairs in the Science Library, but some older journals are still on LL1 in Leyburn.

Many journals have Web home pages that offer search utilities --thus, the American Chemical Society's stable of journals can be queried via ACS Free Search (there's a link on, for example, the Journal of Organic Chemistry's home page, covering 1996-present.

Another search possibility is Science, which carries some materials on chemistry. W&L now has full text access to the journal.