The first - and possibly most important - step is to select the appropriate database for your topic. There are many different kinds of databases out there, but you're looking for an index-type resource, that covers the literature of a field across all publishers and formats. There are many to choose from across all subjects. Here are the most useful ones for chemistry:
WOS is a large suite of databases that selectively covers thousands of journals across all scientific disciplines.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) is a comprehensive tool covering the chemical literature back to 1907, and is used primarily by researchers and advanced students. The search interface is not particularly intuitive or user-friendly. The search algorithm doesn't work like others you may be used to. Retrieval on simple searches may be overwhelming, since CAS indexes thousands of publications and millions of patents in over 50 languages. Caveat: You have to register for a personal account in SciFinder and log in before searching.
Updated daily. Requires users to register with a utexas.edu email account. Provides integrated access to the Chemical Abstracts suite of databases with millions of bibliographic records covering the worldwide chemical literature, including patents; as well as over 100 million substance records, with chemical structures, names, synonyms, and associated property data; plus millions of searchable organic reactions. Search by topic, author, chemical identification terms (names, formulas, Registry Numbers), and chemical structures.
GS is a popular free search engine. It indexes the full text of millions of articles in electronic scholarly journals across many disciplines. While the search interface is simple, there's not much you can do with it other than enter some words and then browse voluminous results. It's fine if you just want to find a handful of relevant articles quickly. But you shouldn't rely on Google Scholar for comprehensive searching, especially in chemistry. GS is also completely unvetted -- it indexes junk alongside good stuff and makes no distinction.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.
