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Chemistry & Chemical Engineering (CCE): Reaxys Tutorial

Library information and resources for the CCE Division at Caltech. Resources for this guide were originally compiled and maintained by Dana Roth.

Access Reaxys

Resources from Reaxys:

  • Navigating Reaxys: Contains screenshots from classic and new Reaxys, showing how to find features and functionality in the new interface.
  • Reaxys Quick Start Guide: A quick overview of all Reaxys features and where to find them.

Literature Search Options

From the main new Reaxys start page, the default "Quick search" page displays a simple text search box that can be used in conjunction with a chemical structure or reaction drawing. The Quick search uses natural language processing to search all three core Reaxys databases: Documents (literature), Substances (chemical entities), and Reactions.

The "Query builder" allows for the construction of a more advanced search using different fields, and one can specify what kind of results one is interested in - literature, chemical substances, or reaction schemes.

Boolean operators can be used in all fields for multi-word searches. The list of recognized Boolean operators are:

  • AND looks for all terms in the publication record.
  • OR looks for any term in the publication record.
  • NOT looks for records that have all other terms but exclude records that have the NOT term.
  • NEXT looks for records that have the terms in the indicated order next to each other.
  • NEAR looks for records with terms adjacent to each other (order doesn't matter).

Working with a Results Set

The list of citations in the result set are displayed by default in descending order of Publication Year, but can also be sorted by Journal Title, Author, and Document Type. Clicking on the "Title/Abstract" for any citation will display the full citation for a record. You can view the articles which cite a selected article, but there is no way to sort by that criterion at present.

The left side displays fields by which to Filter the result set, including Document Type, Author, etc. Clicking on a field will display "by Group" by default, which gives you a summary of how many documents fall into various categories under that field - i.e. Authors will display the list of authors in the results set, and you can Limit to (Include) or Exclude certain authors to form a new results set. Choosing "by Value" allows you to search within the results set for a term of your choosing in the selected field.

Saving and Exporting Citations

Citations can be saved to a local Reaxys account, if one is created.

To export citation information follow these steps:

From Reaxys:

  1. Select "Output".
  2. In the popup window, next to "Output", select "Citations Table".
  3. Next to "to", select Literature Management Systems (e.g. ReferenceManager, EndNote etc.).
  4. Next to Output Range, select the citation range desired.
  5. Next to "Output contains" check whether abstracts are to be included along with citation data.
  6. Click "OK".
  7. Click "Download" and the .ris file will download to the default download location specified by your browser.