This article needs attention from an expert in Chemistry. The specific problem is: The article is essentially an unsourced essay of lowest standard that is in defiance of WP:VERIFY and so fails at being encyclopedic.See the talk page for details. WikiProject Chemistry may be able to help recruit an expert.(March 2016)
Chemical synthesis is the purposeful execution of one or more named reactions to obtain a product, or several products.  In modern laboratory usage, this tends to imply that the process is reproducible, reliable, and established to work in multiple laboratories.
A chemical synthesis—synthesis, in its present meaning, begins with the selection of chemical product target, which often possesses academic, industrial or therapeutic interest to the broader aims of the research effort. Secondary practical concerns also come into play, including researcher availability, availability of material resources (necessary equipment, chemical building blocks), and research budget. A research grant proposal is often submitted to a funding agency (such as National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health), which describes the background/proposed synthesis and research plans, and secondary concerns. For instance, a prior developed reaction methodology may highlight particular man-made or natural compounds that would serve the purposes of the effort, in highlighting the breadth of the new methodology and possibly providing facile access to complex natural products. Once the target or targets are established, the next critical phase begins, that of synthetic design, typically in modern efforts, in the area of organic synthesis, using retrosynthetic analysis, as championed by E.J. Corey and others.
The amount of product in a chemical synthesis is the reaction yield.[dubious– discuss] Typically, chemical yields are expressed as a weight in grams (in a laboratory setting)[dubious– discuss] or as a percentage of the total theoretical quantity of product that could be produced. A side reaction is an unwanted chemical reaction taking place that diminishes the yield of the desired product.
This section is missing information about nearly all subjects remotely expected of a discussion of synthetic strategy in the 21st century, especially variants of strategy as applied to peptide, inorganic, and other non-OChem fields . Please expand the section to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.(March 2016)
Many strategies exist in chemical synthesis that go beyond converting reactant A to reaction product B in a single step. In multistep synthesis, a chemical compound is synthesised though a series of individual chemical reactions, each with their own work-up. [full citation needed] For example, a laboratory synthesis of paracetamol can consist of three individual synthetic steps. In cascade reactions multiple chemical transformations take place within a single reactant, in multi-component reactions up to 11 different reactants form a single reaction product and in a telescopic synthesis one reactant goes through multiple transformations without isolation of intermediates.
This section is missing information about nearly all subjects remotely expected of a discussion of synthetic strategy in the 21st century. Please expand the section to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.(March 2016)
Organic synthesis is a special branch of chemical synthesis dealing with the synthesis of organic compounds. In the total synthesis of a complex product it may take multiple steps to synthesize the product of interest, and inordinate amounts of time. Skill in organic synthesis is prized among chemists and the synthesis of exceptionally valuable or difficult compounds has won chemists such as Robert Burns Woodward the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. If a chemical synthesis starts from basic laboratory compounds and yields something new, it is a purely synthetic process. If it starts from a product isolated from plants or animals and then proceeds to new compounds, the synthesis is described as a semisynthetic process.
This section needs expansion with: a two paragraph description, each, based on good secondary sources (not undergraduate texts, which, by WP:VERIFY, etc., are tertiary) of the scope, targets and other aims, and methods, of the two subsections appearing. You can help by adding to it. (March 2016)