Back to Guides

If you need help, don't hesitate to ask at the reference desk, or contact Reference Librarians Linda Moore or Mark Maier.

Try these encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference guides to get started. Click on the link to see the call number.

Chemistry Literature Guides :
How To Find Chemical Information Ref QD 8.5 .M34 1998. For an online version, click here.

Chemistry Resources in the Electronic Age Ref QD 9.3 .B39 2003

Encyclopedias:
Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology Ref TP 9 .E685

Handbooks and Tables:
Lange's Handbook of Chemistry Ref QD 65 L36 1999
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics Ref QD 65 .H3

Dictionary:
Facts on File Dictionary of Chemistry Ref. QD 5 .F33

Biographical Information:
Dictionary of Scientific Biography Ref Q 141 .D5

Reviews of the literature:
Chemical Reviews
Annual Review of Physical Chemistry Ref QD 1 .A5

Citing Sources
The ACS Style Guide: A Manual for Authors and Editors. Ref QD8.5.A25
For an online version, click here.

American Chemical Society (ACS) Citation Style for Internet Sources.

Moving to the next step: finding books

To find books in the Mossey Library, use the Mossey Library Catalog.

Use MeLCat to request books and audio-visual materials directly from other Michigan libraries over the web. Use OCLC World Cat to search the holdings of over 3000 libraries worldwide in a single search. You will have to use interlibrary loan to obtain copies of these books.

Continuing on: the best places to find articles

Basic level search: to find basic or general articles on chemical topics already in the Mossey Library, use the General Sciences Abstracts. Many of the articles in this index are available online in electronic format. The General Sciences Abstracts indexes about 30 of the basic titles in Chemistry.

Intermediate level search: for more advanced topics, you can search over 12,000 journals in a single search by using Article First, which indexes over 300 core titles in Chemistry. To search for articles published only by the American Chemical Society, click here. Try the comprehensive science database Web of Knowledge, which allows for citation searching and linking and has access to bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references found in approximately 5,900 leading scholarly science and technical journals from 1900-present.

Comprehensive search: for extensive searches of scientific and technical articles in chemistry, schedule an appointment with a Reference Librarian (Linda Moore or Mark Maier) to conduct a search of CHEMICAL ABSTRACTS. CA provides indexes and abstracts for thousands of journals, dissertations and conference reports.

Scholarly Websites to Pursue

Rather than using a comprehensive search engine such as Google or Yahoo, use a more focused and scholarly search engine such as CHEMDEX, compiled by chemists, or the one at the Michigan Electronic Library, maintained by librarians. These finding tools provide fewer but higher quality sites than general purposes search engines.

Try searching GoogleScholar for scholarly literature across many disciplines and identify resources available from Mossey Library.

Try also the website Chmoogle, a new, open-access chemistry search engine.

Also, the Physics and Astronomy Reference offers collections of links to additional resources within its reference pages for the physical sciences.

Another resource to use for in-depth research is Science.gov, a tool to search authoratative scientific information from 30 federal scientific databases and more than 1,800 science websites.

Careers in Chemistry and Departmental Resources

See: Great Jobs for Chemistry Majors, Ref QD39.5 .R688 1999.

For additional information, see the Hillsdale College Chemistry Department Homepage.