Chemistry & Biochemistry: Encyclopedias / Reference Works

Chemistry and Biochemistry Encyclopedias

These reference works contain authoritative overviews on topics in chemistry and biochemistry. Written by experts in their respective fields, the articles contain extensive bibliographies of journal articles for further information. You can browse each reference work by title/topic or search the full text.

Here's a selected list of the more recent reference works, with publication dates included, to give you an idea of how current the articles are.

You may also want to search Web of Science for more recent review articles published in journals. Select Review Article from the quick filters in your search results.
Kirk-Othmer, Ullmann's, and Encyclopedia of Life Sciences are updated several times a year, so you need to check the article publication date to see if it's current enough for your use.

Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology
Comprehensive chemical encyclopedia covering all aspects of chemistry and chemical engineering. Good complement to Ullmann's. [Adds/updates articles quarterly]
Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry
Comprehensive chemical encyclopedia covering all aspects of chemistry and chemical engineering. Good complement to Kirk-Othmer. [Adds/updates articles quarterly]
Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (ELS)
Comprehensive life science encyclopedia that covers biochemistry, molecular biology, structural biology, and other topics of interest. [Updates monthly]
Comprehensive Inorganic Chemistry III
Fundamental principles, recent discoveries, and significant applications of the inorganic elements and their compounds, including main group chemistry, biological inorganic chemistry, solid state and materials chemistry, catalysis, new developments in electrochemistry and photochemistry, and NMR and diffraction methods for studying inorganic compounds. [3rd ed, 2023]
Encyclopedia of Materials: Electronics
Compilation on the science, engineering, and technology of electronic materials and devices. Covers organic electronics, electroceramics, complex oxides, magnetic materials; photonic materials; and sensors, energy, and nanoscale materials. [2023]
Comprehensive Chemometrics: Chemical and Biochemical Data Analysis
Reference work focusing on statistics, experimental methods, analysis of variance, optimization, linear soft-modeling, unsupervised learning, data analysis problems, data processing, regression and classification, and applications. [2nd ed, 2020]
Comprehensive Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Comprehensive and authoritative coverage of every aspect of modern nanoscience and nanotechnology, including nanomaterials, nanochemistry and nanofabrication, biological nanoscience, spectroscopy and microscopy, and nanoscience applications. [2nd ed, 2019]
Comprehensive Energy Systems
Covers a spectrum of energy topics: fundamentals, materials, production, conversion, and management. [2018]
Encyclopedia of Spectroscopy and Spectrometry
Covers fundamentals, technology and applications of atomic, electronic, high energy, magnetic, mass, vibrational and raman spectroscopy. [3rd ed., 2017]
Handbook of Solid State Chemistry
Articles on the chemistry of solids, nanoparticles, and hybrid materials. Covers: materials and structure of solids, synthesis, characterization, nano and hybrid materials, theoretical description, and functional materials. [2017]