Free Tool for Chemists

Over the last years, structure-based chemical databases such as Beilstein, REACCS and SciFinder have gained tremendous importance for the synthetic organic chemist. These subscription-based software tools facilitate access to a plethora of valuable information. Due to their structure-centered indexing, both Beilstein and SciFinder are ideal tools for structure queries. In contrast, an annotation system for organic reactions has only recently been developed at Brandeis University, available as WebReactions (WR).

WR is a recast version of InfoChem’s ChemReact database, containing 401671 individual reactions abstracted from the primary literature between 1975 and 1991. By comparison to other reaction databases, its limited catalogue of years is one of the major drawbacks of WR. However, unlike Beilstein Crossfire and SciFinder, access to WR is free of charge, and requires only a web browser. For more information, please read the review (see link below).

Publication

U. Iserloh, Webreactions.net: A Free and Fast Chemical Reaction Search, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2002, 41, 2851. Download PDF.