There are tools that can do a lot, but the more powerful they are, the more complex they seem to be. And none of the tools is omniscient. A lot of it is reports of primary research, published in journals . Sometimes there's money in it, and the highly specialized world of patents is especially concerned with that prospect. But academic libraries accumulate enormous volumes of paper on which people report the results of research in great detail, and most of it will never be read, except by very small numbers of people who happen to be working on the same thing, and they read because they have to know what others in the same area are up to.
Primary literature is what such reports of research are called.
The main key to finding items in this realm is Chemical Abstracts , which we'll discuss elsewhere. Some journals publish them, and some annual series do as well, but a single source that indexes the review literature of organic chemistry is difficult to find. Most of our Chemistry journals are upstairs in the Science Library, but some older journals are still on LL1 in Leyburn. Another search possibility is Science , which carries some materials on chemistry.