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Organic Chemistry

Organic Chemistry Reaction Map

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With it being half term here in the UK, what better use of sudden vast amounts of free time could there be than making an organic chemistry reaction map? This graphic looks at simple interconversions between common functional groups in organic chemistry. I’m not going to pretend it’s comprehensive, because it certainly isn’t, being primarily aimed at A Level students; to the best of my knowledge, all of the information contained within it is correct, but feedback from any organic chemists out there would be very much appreciated!

There’s more news regarding the infographics on the site to come within the next few days – in the meantime, you can download the free high-resolution PDF of this graphic here.

Thanks to @DaK_64 & @ashl3ylaw on twitter for kindly sharing their own versions of organic reaction maps, which were of great help in putting this graphic together. This map from the University of York was also very useful indeed, and gave me the idea of colour coding the arrows to indicate the reaction type.

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22 replies on “Organic Chemistry Reaction Map”

Your infographics are great, I think that we teachers often underestimate the importance of making teaching materials visually attractive and ‘professional’ in appearance. As an example, a reaction map that I have been using can be found at http://www.ucd.ie/chem/chemint/retrosynth/FGI.pdf. The reactions are organised in a somewhat different way than in your map, intended to emphasise the relationships between the functional groups, but the layout is horrible by comparison with yours.
Keep up the good work.
Mike Casey

Thanks 🙂 I agree completely with the idea of making learning materials visually attractive – I’m generally quite fussy about using other people’s resources unless they’re nicely presented, although that might just be me being fussy to an extent. With the organic reaction maps, I guess the difficulty is including a large amount of information whilst keeping it useful; this map, for instance, certainly contains a lot more information than mine (the reactions are numbered and detailed on accompanying pages) but it’s also pretty nightmarish to look at! Yours is quite nice by comparison, and believe me, it took a lot of moving stuff around to get the layout in mine as clear as it is…

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Trying to memorise reagents and reaction conditions is extremely frustrating – this helps a lot.

Thanks from an A-Level student.

thank you for sharing this reaction map,
i can teach my olympic student easily with this and they no need to remember from the text book 🙂

Hi, Sorry, but the “click to enlarge” button isn’t working. The image I can save is a bit pixeley =[

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