This is meant only to be a brief guide to some of the resources available to you which could help you in writing your thesis this year. Please do not hesitate to contact Meg Spencer, the Science Librarian, in Cornell Library if you have any questions or problems with your research. (This guide is general enough to be used by anyone needing to find Chemistry information...)

1. Get some background information on your subject.

• Go into TRIPOD and do a WORD search to see if there are any books on the subject. Look at publication dates - unless this is an historical overview, you'll most likely want current books on your topic. QDis the Chemistry section. Biochemistry tends to be scattered in QD, QH & QP.

Note: If you aren't able to track down a book on Tripod, check out WorldCat, an amazing, huge database of over 36 million items (books, videos, etc). It's a good place to discover new resources, or get a complete record for an InterLibrary Loan request.

• Using Encyclopedias & Handbooks in the Reference section can also give you manageable overview articles:

Ref Q121 .M3 1997 McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology - available online at the Access Science site.
Ref QD4 .M33 1997 v.1 - 4 MacMillan Encyclopedia of Chemistry.
Ref QD5 .V37 2005 Van Nostrand's Encylopedia of Chemistry
Ref QD155 .5 .P37 2003 Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry
Ref QD415 .A25E53 2004 v. 1 - 4 Encyclopedia of Biological Chemistry
Ref QP512 .O94 1997 Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology.

Other useful Reference books for Chemistry:

Ref QD8 .5 .A25 1997 The ACS Style Guide - 2nd edition (or take a look at the online style guide, The Council of Biology Editors Style of Documentation in Science or Mathematics for information on electronic citations, etc.).
Ref QD53 .C69 1997 The Laboratory Companion: A Practical Guide To Materials, Equipment & Technique.
Ref QD65 .C4 CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics - also available ONLINE version.

• Check out xRefer Plus is a giant online reference library that provides you with access to a selection of 169 reference books. xreferplus includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and books of quotations, not to mention a range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy and literature to law. Find out about the Science titles in xreferplus.

2. Now you want to see what has been written specifically about your topic in JOURNALS. If you need an overview of a topic, you may be able to limit your search to review articles by including 'review' in the search list. For more information, check out the web page on "How to find review articles".

• ProQuest - a good place to start your research.

• WEB OF SCIENCE - the web version of Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index! Coverage goes back to 1989. This is a good, interdisciplinary index with a unique feature which allows you to search for articles which CITE a particular article. Endnote and Web of Science

• Chmoogle - 'searching the World's Chemistry'. The world's leading open-access chemistry search engine.

• PubChem - produced by the National Library of Medicine, PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. Can search by structure, name, substance or biassay records.

• Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB) - Comprehensive, peer-reviewed toxicology data for about 5,000 chemicals.

• SciFinder Scholar is our latest online access to Chemical Abstracts! Access is available on most public PCs. If you want to use this on your own computer, you must download the client from the Software server - there is a step-by-step guide to downloading this to your own hard drive.

• ANNUAL REVIEWS - online access to ALL of the Annual Reviews we currently subscribe to. You can also find these IN PRINT - do a search on Tripod for a specific series title. OR you can do a Tripod search and select a specific title online.

• Patent Full Text Database - contains the full-text of over 3,000,000 patents from 1976 to the present, plus limited bibliographic data for over 4,000,000 patents from 1790 to 1975. It provides links to the Web Patent Full-Page Images Database (PatImg), which contains over 70,000,000 images, including every page of over 7,000,000 patents from 1790 to the most recent issue week.

• American Chemical Society journals - electronic access to 23 ACS journals, including Journal of the ACS . These journals have their own search engine.

• Royal Society of Chemistry - this will link you to the search engine for RSC journals. We don't have access to ALL of these journals, but for the ones we do subscribe to, you should be able to get full-text access online.

• IOP E-Journal Database - FREE full text searching is available for IOP's Electronic Journals archive back to 1874. The archive includes over 172,000 articles and 1,000 volume-years of journals. Full text links to those IOP journals we have online access to.

Electronic Journals & MORE!

• We do not have electronic access to ALL journals! There are still journals that don't exist electronically. Check Tripod for PRINT holdings.

• Look for the Connect to [journal title] from SWARTHMORE message in the middle of the journal record. If there is no Swarthmore message, that means we don't have access to it. If the journal is available at Bryn Mawr or Haverford Science Libraries, you will need to request the article via InterLibrary Loan.

• Look for the MORE! button by citations when you run a search in most indexes. Click on the MORE! button next to the citation you want and a second window will open up.
From this window you can:

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InterLibrary Loan

While Cornell Library has a really good collection, obviously there will be times when we don't actually own something you've located in your research. That is when you'll need to borrow from other libraries and to do this you will need Inter-Library Loan (ILL).

Tri-College ILL - BOOKS: If you want a book from Bryn Mawr or Haverford, simply press the REQUEST button at the top of the Tripod screen. Enter your name & barcode, and select WHERE you want to pick up the book. Delivery takes approximately one day library to library.

Non-TriCollege ILL - BOOKS: For books NOT available in Tripod, try E-Z Borrow and request books directly from nearby Pennsylvania & NJ libraries. If you can't find the book you are looking for on EZ-Borrow, fill out the book request form.

JOURNAL ARTICLES: If you need an article from a journal not subscribed to by Swarthmore, fill out the journal article request form.

* Journals DO circulate from main libraries, so if you need an article from a non-science library journal, place a hold on the actual journal volume in Tripod and it will be sent via TriCo van!

• Your Swat ID will get you into Penn's libraries, but you cannot borrow directly from them. You must use ILL to get anything from Penn

• Scirus - a web search engine devoted to Science & Technology.

• Google: Chemistry sites - from the Google Directory. There are LOTS of chemistry web sites here.

• The Information Retrieval in Chemistry - comprehensive index of chemistry on the web.

• PubChem Project - ' provides information on the biological activities of small molecules.' This web site provides a free structure searching database!

• ChemFinder - A searchable database for chemicals. Can search by common name, molecular weight or formula or CAS registry number. You may need to set up a user profile, but using this web site is free.

• Sigma-Aldrich - another searchable database for chemicals.

• In Cornell, we do not have formal Reference Desk coverage, so if you have any questions or problems finding information there, please do not hesitate to come to Meg's office and ask her. If Meg is unavailable, send her an e-mail and we can arrange a research appointment. 

Meg E. Spencer, Science Librarian

URL http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/cornell/Sciences/chemthesis01.htm
Created 10/22/99 Last updated 1.18.06 mes