The number of chemical syntheses reported is large and growing exponentially. While naturally indicative of greater scientific progress, this leads to two significant challenges. Firstly, researchers are confronted with the growing difficulty of maintaining a comprehensive overview and understanding of the diverse landscape of synthetic routes and conditions accessible for a particular group of compounds. Secondly, although the repository of published synthesis data contains an immense wealth of information, its potential for systematic development of new synthesis protocols remains largely untapped and underutilized. In response to this, various informatics approaches have been adopted to standardise the data produced during chemical research. For example, the creation of chemical synthesis ontologies and automated reactionware has enabled new procedures to be directly compared against previously-published data or shared openly through chemical "programming languages". However, the nature of reporting synthesis protocols -as unformatted prose in a written report -has remained largely unchanged.