The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) maintains several commissions that deal with the naming of chemical substances. In general, the approach of IUPAC is to present rules for arriving at names in a systematic manner, rather than recommending a unique name for each compound. Thus, there are often several alternative “IUPAC Names,” depending on which nomenclature system is used, each of which may have advantages in specific applications. However, each of these names will be unambiguous.
Organizations such as the Chemical Abstracts Service that prepare indexes to the chemical literature must adopt a system for selecting unique names in order to avoid excessive cross referencing. Chemical Abstracts Service uses a system which groups together compounds derived from a single parent compound. Thus, most index names are inverted (e.g., Benzene, bromo rather than bromobenzene; Acetic acid, sodium salt rather than sodium acetate).
Recommended names for the most common substituent groups, ligands, ions, and organic rings are given in the two following tables, “Nomenclature for Inorganic Ions and Ligands” and “Organic Substituent Groups and Ring Systems,” which are available in the Online Edition of the CRC Handbook. For the basics of macromolecular nomenclature, see “Nomenclature for Organic Polymers” in Section 13.
Some of the most useful recent guides to chemical nomenclature, prepared by IUPAC and other organizations such as the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) and the American Chemical Society are listed below. These books contain citations to the more detailed nomenclature documents in each area. Two very useful links to nomenclature documents are:
<iupac.org/what-we-do/nomenclature/>
<www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iupac/>