NIST Standard Reference Database 3 | NIST Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

NIST Standard Reference Database 3

NIST Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD)  SRD 3

Materials discovery and development necessarily begins with the preparation and identification of product phase(s).  Crystalline compounds can be identified by their characteristic diffraction patterns using X-rays, neutrons, and or electrons.  An estimated 20,000 X-ray diffractometers and a comparable number of electron microscopes are used daily in materials research and development laboratories for this purpose. Access to crystal structure data is a critical step in solving research and applications problems in materials researches, and these data are of interest to analysts in areas such as materials design, property prediction and compound identification.

NIST Crystallographic Data Center, in collaboration with partners all over the world, evaluates and disseminates chemical, physical and crystallographic information published on these materials. NIST Standard Reference Database 3: NIST Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (NIST ICSD) is a comprehensive collection of crystal structure data of nonorganic compounds (including inorganics, ceramics, minerals, pure elements, metals, and intermetallic systems) containing over 210,000 entries and covering the literature from 1913.  

NIST ICSD includes entries that fall into the following categories: full structure data from experimental refinement or derived from their iso-structural structure types, theoretically predicted structures from computer simulations, as well as partially characterized structures. 

The NIST ICSD web application provides materials researchers with a user-friendly interface to search the database based on bibliographic information, chemistry, unit cell, space group, experimental settings, mineral name/group and other derived data from expert evaluation. In addition, it also provides users with functions to easily create and examine results from various crystallographic computations, such as reduced cell, bond distance/angle, calculated powder diffraction data, and structure standardization. 

For more information visit https://icsd.nist.gov

Pricing Information:

Annual Subscription Users Price
Individual 1 user
$200    PLACE ORDER
 Multiple Users      2 to 9 users $950    PLACE ORDER
 Unlimited Users    10+ users $1900  PLACE ORDER

 

For information about purchasing and accessing your subscription:

Standard Reference Data Program
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Dr., Stop 6410
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-6410
(844) 374-0183 (Toll Free) 

data [at] nist.gov (Customer Support)

For technical questions:

Dr. Igor Levin
National Institute of Standards and Technology 
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8520
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8520 

icsd [at] nist.gov (icsd[at]nist[dot]gov)
 

Created August 8, 2019, Updated March 23, 2022