Arthur Noyes was a professor of physical chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Review was initially a supplement to MIT's Technology Quarterly. In 1897 it became part of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). Five years later, William A. Noyes, Sr., a distant cousin of Arthur A. Noyes, became editor of JACS and the Review of American Chemical Research. William Noyes long believed that the American Chemical Society should publish a comprehensive and inclusive separate journal of abstracts. He worked diligently to persuade the Society to authorize an abstract journal; in 1906, the ACS Council approved publication of Chemical Abstracts, with Noyes as editor. The first issue appeared in January 1907.

CA was not the first publication to abstract chemical information. Scientific abstracts first appeared in primary journals, which published abstracts of work reported in other sources in addition to original research. One example was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The first specifically chemical publication to include abstracts was Crell's Chemische Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, which was published from 1778-1781. Other German publications appeared in the late 1700s as fora for chemists to exchange information and research. French and British scientific publications followed suit in the next century, with examples such as Annales de Chimie and the Journal of the Chemical Society.

At the same time, publications specifically devoted to chemical abstracts began to appear. The most famous of these was Chemisches Zentralblatt, which debuted in 1830. It was published weekly under the editorship of Gustav Theodor Fechner. Chemisches Zentralblatt initially covered only German literature, and while it expanded its coverage in the early 20th century, the emphasis was always on German material. Chemisches Zentralblatt remained an important abstracting service until World War II. It was the emphasis on German chemistry that prompted the interest in an American abstract service.

Noyes served as editor of CA for its first two years. At first, Noyes worked from his laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, where he was chief chemist. He and Chemical Abstracts moved to the University of Illinois when Noyes became chair of the chemistry department in 1907. Noyes contribution to the success of CA cannot be exaggerated. Not only did he persuade the ACS to sponsor an abstract journal, but he organized, planned, and edited CA while serving as ACS secretary and working full time. Many of the policies he implemented served CA for decades.

One of Noyes's most important legacies was his insistence that Chemical Abstracts cover applied as well as theoretical chemistry. In the early 20th century the gulf between industrial and academic or theoretical chemists was wide and many of the latter thought the ACS, and its publications, should belong to "pure" chemists only with applied chemists shunted off to a separate organization. In England and Germany chemists split along these lines and in both countries distinct abstract journals existed. CA pioneered in the merging of the interests of these two groups of chemists.

In 1909 Austin Patterson succeeded Noyes as editor, and the editorial offices moved to The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus at the invitation of William McPherson, head of the OSU Chemistry Department. CA remained at Ohio State until 1965 when the Chemical Abstracts Service moved into its own building on a 50-acre site adjacent to the university.