Overview

• Not Voodoo - great compendium of knowledge for chemistry
• Org Syn - journal of proven synthetic routes
• JOC Common Solvent Impurities article - useful desk reference
• Organometallics Common Solvent Impurities article - useful desk reference
• SBDS spectrum search engine - can help with characterisation. Thousands of reference spectra.
• Organic Chemistry Portal - excellent set of resources, some picked out below:
  • Named reaction reference
  • Protecting group selection guides
• List of TLC stains – summary of my preferred ones:
  • Permanganate: good general stain, for compounds with oxidisable sites. Heat to develop.
  • CAM: good general stain. Heat to develop.
  • Iodine: great stain for alkynes and alkenes
  • 2,4-DNP: useful stain selective for aldehydes and ketones

• Gaussian
• Turbomole
• Orca
• Dalton2016
• MOPAC

Useful tools/programs:

• Avogadro: cross-platform molecule viewer
• Jmol: cross-platform molecule viewer
• cclib: a powerful Python library for handling compchem output

Free books and tutorials:

• SciFinder - essential literature searching
• Reaxys - essential literature searching
• Web of Science - essential literature searching
• CCDC search - crystal structure search
• Aldrich substructure search
• CAS List of Journal Abbreviations - useful list of journal abbreviations in case you ever wish to check
• Chemistry Reference Resolver - saves huges amounts of time by resolving chemistry references (of the form JACS 2011 11211) into URLs for you. No more need to navigate journal web-pages. From my testing: ACS and RSC journals don’t need volume numbers. For Tetrahedron and Tet. Lett.: skip the year, and give a volume number instead.
• Feedspot - replacement for Google Reader (for those who remember it), or for others: a good way to keep up to date with journal articles.

Useful Chrome Extensions: