What is background research?

Background research gives you basic information about a topic that may be new to you. This kind of information usually isn't covered in research articles, so without doing background research, you may have trouble understanding the research articles you find. Use the three strategies below to find background information about chemical synthesis.

1. Search for books

• Use Library Search to find books on your topic
• Use broader search terms than you would when searching for articles
• Textbooks can be great sources of background information, but don't use the textbooks option in Library Search--this only searches books being used in courses this semester. Use "books and media" instead.

2. Find review articles

Reviews, also called literature reviews, give an overview of what many different scientists have been researching and writing about in a particular area.

• Filter for Reviews using the menu to the left of database results. Most science databases have this filter option.
• If you can, also filter for books and book chapters in your search results.
• Do not look for book reviews. These are short articles about a newly published book, they are not sources of background information.

3. Follow citations

Scholarly articles include citations indicating where each piece of information comes from.

• Check the article introduction and literature review sections for useful citations.
• To learn more about a piece of information, look at the citation at the end of that sentence.
• In chemistry articles, citations often look like numbers in parentheses. Go to the end of the article and find the reference with the corresponding number.

Have an abbreviated journal title? Click the CAS Source Index Search Tool icon to find the full title: