[trinitrotoluene]

Hello everyone -

For my reaction mechanisms class, I have a project coming up. The idea would be that we find a paper for which the reaction mechanism is unknown. We then propose experimental methods to elucidate the mechanism. I have been trolling JACS and JOC for a couple of hours now, and finding such a paper is proving difficult.

So my question is: is there an efficient way to browse the literature to find such a paper? Or would such a task be accomplished purely through brute force?

Thank you

[Archer]

JACS and JOC are not your friends here, most of them propose mechanisms. Try J. Med. Chem or a different journal.

[spirochete]

JACS and JOC are not your friends here, most of them propose mechanisms. Try J. Med. Chem or a different journal.

Yes but half the time the mechanism proposed is at best an educated guess and at worst something that the authors just thought "looked good." And a paper which does not give a mechanism could be omitting this part because the authors see it as trivial. My friend published a paper a year ago where he proved that a very famous guy (like top 20 organic profs) had the mechanism wrong on a methadology paper he published.

I'd say go for a multi component organocatalyzed reaction, just make sure there hasn't been a good computational paper published on it. Or better yet find a computational paper that supposedly finds the mechanism and see if you can think of experiments that could prove/disprove their wild claims about the efficacy of B3LYP. The good thing here is that the computational paper will already propose at least two mechanisms for you.

[spirochete]

What I should add is that your job here is not as easy as simply looking at papers and checking to see if there's a mechanism given in the paper. Assuming these are mainly methadology papers you're reading, you need to look up the references in those papers and see if there are additonal experimental and/or computational papers that verify the claims made  about the mechanism.