Skip to Main Content

Chemistry Research Guide: Web resources

Resources for chemistry students. Contact us at the Reference Desk for help with your library research, by phone at (819) 822-9600, ext. 2608 or by email at reference@ubishops.ca

Evaluating web sites

Not all information found on the World Wide Web is reliable or accurate. To help you decide which web sites to trust, try looking at the following 5 criteria.

  1. Who is the sponsor of the site? What organization or individual created the site? Is the site biased?
  2. Who is the author of the information? Is the author identified and are credentials given?
  3. What is the purpose of the site? Is it intended to educate, inform, influence views or sell a product?
  4. What is the coverage? Is the material relevant, accurate, and complete? Are the sources documented? Can the information be verified from other sources?
  5. Is the information current? Is it clear when the site was created, or when it was last updated? If there are links to other sites, are the links still active?

Chemistry web resources

American Chemical Society

BioMed Central All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

Bishop's University Department of Chemistry

IUPAC Gold Book Compendium of chemical terminology from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry

National Research Press Journals Provides free access to backfiles of 16 scientific journals published by the National Research Council of Canada.

NIST Chemistry WebBook This site provides thermochemical, thermophysical, and ion energetics data compiled by NIST under the Standard Reference Data Program.

PubMed A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948.

Theses Canada Portal  Canadian theses and dissertations.

WebElements The periodic table on the web.

For more information

There are many guides to evaluating internet resources freely available on the web (for example at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries web site, and the Owl at Purdue),

or see Cite it right, by Tom Fox, Julia Johns, and Sarah Keller, found in the Reference Room.

 Product Details

PN 171 .F56 F69 2007 Ref