Introducing variable substituents is challenging in any substructure search, but the challenges are compounded during a reaction search.  A researcher may not have a definite substituent in mind, instead suggesting that a site can be occupied by "any aryl group" or, still worse, "any electron withdrawing group."  Even a researcher who generates an R-group and populates it with specific substituents can run into problems because atom mapping from reactant to product is prohibited within R-group fragments.  This paper examines some ways that researchers can introduce "specific ambiguities" like these into reaction searches in several major databases, while also examining the peculiarities and ambiguities of indexing that may lead a reaction search to locate a paper in one product but ignore the same paper in another.

Any electron withdrawing group will do: Introducing specific ambiguity into reaction searches

254th National Meeting (2017)

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