Research Guides: Chemistry: Chemicals / Drugs

Chemicals and drugs

There are many databases that identify and describe chemicals and drugs. A select list of databases below can be searched by a chemical's common or trade name, CAS Registry number, molecular formula, or structure where appropriate

Reaxys
- Find chemical structures, reactions, and properties.
- Useful for researching synthetic methods of chemical compounds, characterizing synthesized compounds, or searching for critically evaluated data on physical, chemical, spectral, bioactivity, or toxicological properties.
- Includes Beilstein (to 1959, Supplement IV); Gmelin (to 1975); and selected organic chemistry patents (1869-1980) with English-language chemical patents (US, WO, EP, 1976+) from selected primary IPC classes.
- Permitted Uses

Sigma-Aldrich
- Commercial chemical catalog to include MSDS sheets, availability, chemical identification and structure searching.
Chemexper.com
- Search chemicals by structure, name and physical properties.
ChemSpider
- RSC's authoritative online source for aggregated chemical information and data for common chemicals.
Common Chemistry (CAS)
- Registry of over 7,900 common chemicals of widespread and general public interest.
PubChem (NIH)
- Compounds, substances, bioassays, linked to PubMED literature, records and data.
DrugBank
- Includes data and commentary on individual drugs, research, and drug knowledge.
Drugs.com
- A directory and source about all-things-drugs including regulations, alerts and data. Browse drug classifications or by generic, trade or chemical name.
FooDB
- FooDB is the world’s largest and most comprehensive database on food constituents, chemistry and biology.

Books of interest

Merck Index by Royal Society of Chemistry
Call Number: Available in print FL5 RS 51 M4 2013

ISBN: 9781849736701

Publication Date: 2013
Mosby's 2024 Nursing Drug Reference by Linda Skidmore-Roth
Call Number: Read Online

ISBN: 9780443121210

Publication Date: 2023