Library

Find journal articles, newspaper articles, book reviews etc.

Note: the search above won't find every article, for a more comprehensive search see the information below on databases.

To find relevant and good quality information for your work, searching databases is the most effective method. You have free access to a range of searchable databases though you may need your username and password to use some of them. Databases contain quality-assessed journal articles on particular topics.

Databases

• Databases for Chemistry

For help using specific databases - see guides which are found by clicking on the "Full details of this resource" link on individual database records on the databases lists.

Internet sites

Professional and Scholarly Societies

• Royal Society of Chemistry (Cambridge)
• American Chemical Society (Washington DC)
• International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)

Subject Gateways and Internet Sites

• Links for Chemists (University of Liverpool) – the chemistry section of the WWW Virtual Library
• Organic Chemistry Portal
• Chemdex (University of Sheffield). Includes: WebElements (the periodic table on the WWW) 

You might find some resources useful for your dissertation which we don't have available from this Library.

• Use our Inter Library Loan service to order books and journal articles

A general introduction to referencing is available.

Referencing and citing – using your sources

What is referencing?

Referencing is the acknowledgement of items you have read and used while creating a written piece of work for your essay, dissertation, article or thesis.

It is important to keep an exact and complete record of the details of all the sources of information that you use for coursework, essays, dissertations or publications. Sources can include books, journal articles, web pages and legal cases. If you don’t keep a precise record you will have difficulty (and a lot more work) when you need to list the sources in your reference list.

Citations

When writing an essay, report or dissertation, it is usual to cite [mention] the sources that you used, referred to, or took quotes from. These references might describe journal or newspaper articles, books, government reports, web pages

Citing accurate references is important for the following reasons:

• To give credit to concepts and ideas from other authors
• To provide evidence of the extent of your reading
• To use other work to support the arguments you make
• To allow the user to locate the cited references easily
• To help you avoid plagiarism

Which style of referencing does the School of Chemistry use?

There are many styles for references, however, the most commonly used styles are Harvard (a version using author/date format) and Vancouver (numbered format).  

For detailed information, have a look at the Harvard Referencing guide from Leeds University.

Software for managing your references

There are a number of reference management software programs which help you to record and store references to books or journal articles and many other sources while you are working on a project. You can then use the stored information to generate bibliographies for your essay, thesis or article using a wide range of styles. The University supports EndNote. There are also a number of freely available pieces of reference management software.