CHEM 342 -Organic Chemistry - Martin Walker - 2023 Spring

What we will do:

1. Talk about the project
2. Talk about finding chemical literature
3. Decide on who does what
4. EVERYONE searches one or two assigned database(s)
5. EVERYONE keeps a log of their searches and results, even if the results are null
6. EVERYONE identifies the "best" source(s) they found and adds it to the class document
7. Dr. Walker moderates the results for next steps

Please see the lab handout for detailed requirements.  The project overall calls for you to develop a viable lab procedure for the ethylation of menthone {reactant} with the likely products being α-ethylisomenthol or  α-ethylmenthol {products)

Your Task for this Session:

• Search the literature for they synthesis of the {products} from menthone via ethylation.
• find methods to do this and determine the "most appropriate" (as defined by your professor) possibility.
• Find the specific procedure you will use in lab to do this.

While there are many unique aspects to searching chemistry literature, the main process follows the flow of the general research process.  For this lab, the specific tasks and the order in which you will cover them are listed in the tabs above.  Namely:

1) Topic analysis on the reaction:

• What general type of reaction is it? Is it a named reaction?  What are the classes of chemicals involved (e.g. alcohols)?
• What are the anticipated products?  reactants? 
• What are the CAS numbers, inchi names, upac names, chemical formulary, chemical structures, etc. for the products and reactants?  In other words, every synonomous way you can come up with for labeling them.
• What other words or phrases are associated with the reaction, products, reactants,...

2) Types and selection of search tools:

• Finding reactions:
  • By inputing chemical formulary
  • By text searching in:
    • Article databases
    • Reaction databases
    • Electronic book searching (or searching the index of suitable paper books)
    • The free web (google scholar...)
• Finding article literature

3) Searching within the right tools and identifying specific articles/patents

4) Reading the abstracts to determine appropriateness and Selecting which articles to read

5) Locating or interlibrary loaning the full-text of the articles