Consulting secondary and tertiary literature can also be a more efficient way of finding well-established data than going to the original source. Scientific data can be crucial information for your experiments and can help you support and make sense of your own data.

Examples of scientific data include:

• Melting points, solubility, and other properties of a compound.
• Safety information. There are many online sources of Material Safety Data Sheets for compounds with which you may be working.
• Spectra. A number of books and websites compile infrared (IR), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and other types of spectra.
• Terminology. Dictionaries are especially helpful if you don't know what some terms mean. Many science-related dictionaries are available.

In the following sections you will learn how to find scholarly research articles using an index to the scholarly literature.