We describe libSBMLReactionFinder, a C library for retrieving specific biochemical reactions from the curated systems biology markup language models contained in the BioModels database. The library leverages semantic annotations in the database to associate reactions with human-readable descriptions, making the reactions retrievable through simple string searches. Our goal is to provide a useful tool for quantitative modelers who seek to accelerate modeling efforts through the reuse of previously published representations of specific chemical reactions.