Reaxys is a web-based tool for the
retrieval of information about chemical compounds and data from published literature, including journals and patents. The information includes chemical compounds, chemical reactions, chemical properties, related bibliographic data, substance data with synthesis planning information, as well as experimental procedures from selected journals and patents. It is licensed by
Elsevier
Elsevier ( ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...
.
Reaxys was launched in 2009 as the successor to the CrossFire databases. It was developed to provide research chemists with access to current and historical, relevant, organic, inorganic and organometallic chemistry information, from reliable sources via an easy-to-use interface.
Scope and access
One of the primary goals of Reaxys is to provide research chemists with access to experimentally measured data – reactions, physical, chemical or pharmacological – in one universal and factual platform. Content covers organic, medicinal, synthetic, agro, fine, catalyst, inorganic and process chemistry and provides information on structures, reactions, and citations. Additional features include a synthesis planner and access to commercial availability information. There have been regular releases and enhancements to Reaxys since it was first launched, including similarity searching.
Reaxys provides links to
Scopus
Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...
for all matching articles and interoperability with
ScienceDirect. Access to the database is subject to an annual license agreement.
Core data
The content covers more than 200 years of chemistry and has been abstracted from several thousands of journal titles, books and patents. Today the data is drawn from selected journals (400 titles) and chemistry patents, and the excerption process for each reaction or substance data included needs to meet three conditions:
# It has a chemical structure
# It is supported by an experimental fact (property, preparation, reaction)
# It has a credible citation
Journals covered include ''Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis'', ''Journal of American Chemical Society'', ''Journal of Organometallic Chemistry'', ''Synlett'' and ''Tetrahedron''.
Patents in Reaxys come from the International Patent Classes:
* C07 Organic Chemistry
* A61K and secondary IPC C07
edicinal, Dental, Cosmetic Preparations
* A01N
* C09B Dyes
Comparison with other chemical databases
Only a very limited number of studies compared Reaxys with other databases, that provide chemical search functionality, such as
SciFinder,
ChEMBL,
PubChem and
Questel-Orbit. For example, the most comprehensive study published in 2020 by researchers from the
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...
concluded, that "Reaxys is definitely the first choice, due to both its wealth of data and its precise search facilities...but for less common data and spectra SciFinder contains often more information than Reaxys. PubChem should also be included, not only because of its size and accessibility... Reaxys has well over 100 times the number of experimental property data points
... In the case of Reaxys and SciFinder, the natural language query algorithms in Reaxys are displayable, but in
SciFinder the algorithms are proprietary and not available."[Mutton, T. and D. D. Ridley (2019). "Understanding Similarities and Differences between Two Prominent Web-Based Chemical Information and Data Retrieval Tools: Comments on Searches for Research Topics, Substances, and Reactions." Journal of Chemical Education 96(10): 2167-2179.]
See also
* Beilstein database
References
External links
*
{{Reed Elsevier
Chemical databases
Bibliographic databases and indexes