The OECD QSAR Toolbox is a software application intended to be used by governments, the chemical industry and other stakeholders in filling gaps in (eco)toxicity data needed for assessing the hazards of chemicals. The development and release of the Toolbox is a cornerstone in the computerization of hazard assessment, providing an 'all inclusive' tool for the application of category approaches, such as read-across and trend analysis, in a single software application, free of charge. The Toolbox incorporates theoretical knowledge, experimental data and computational tools from various sources into a logical workflow. The main steps of this workflow are substance identification, identification of relevant structural characteristics and potential toxic mechanisms of interaction (i.e. profiling), identification of other chemicals that have the same structural characteristics and/or mechanism (i.e. building a category), data collection for the chemicals in the category and use of the existing experimental data to fill the data gap(s). The description of the Toolbox workflow and its main functionalities is the scope of the present article.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.