There are a whole variety of methods available for researching specific information topics, with the advent of the internet, this process has been much easier. Information may be obtained rapidly from a whole host of different sources, information that would have previously been relatively inaccessible to the everyday person.
For this project many search engines were used. I found that the main webcrawlers were of primary use, these being;Altavista,Webcrawler,Yahoo and Lycos. Hotboc also proved to be very useful.
BIDS was used and gave a comprehensive list of further references. However, I feel that BIDS would be of most benefit to those wishing to research information for a thesis. Unless one has a full understanding of the topic under investigation it is very difficult to determine which references are of most use. This problem is aided though through looking at how many times the document has been cited, and particularly helpful are the abstracts which some documents show. The Beilstein database would also be of great use, although I did not manage to obtain any hits for Taxol or Taxotere.
The main search engines provided good all-around information, of varying technical detail, allowing one to learn about the subject, on a level one could understand. The only real drawback was that alot of irrelevant information was sometimes obtained. This could be partially overcome by specialising the search using words in combination.
Only the main references have been listed as there were so many:
"Synthesis of Enantiomerically pure C8-Desmethly C, D-ring portion of Taxol via Asymmetric Diels-Alder reaction of 2-Siloxyfuran": Address: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc/echet96/papers/041/index.htm
"Taxol and the Yew" Address: http://uchii1.ch.umist.ac.uk/group/subtopics/treeoflife.html
"Taxol:Degradation,release,Calcium,TEM,Model" Address: http://www.aiche.org/aiche/annual meeting/1996/session/158/g/index.html
"Total Synthesis of Taxol" Address: http://cc.oulu.fil~kempmp/taxol:html
Information on Taxotere: Address: http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/1e242.htm
"A short Synthesis of the Taxotere side chain through Dilithiation of of Boc.Benzylamine." Journal,Org.Chem.1993,58,255