This year ChemComm became the first chemistry journal to move to 100 issues per year. To celebrate this achievement, the journal is launching a new article type – the Viewpoint – with the aim of publishing 100 of these very high profile articles over the coming months.
Each of the 100 Viewpoint articles will aim to reflect upon the impact and influence of some of the most renowned papers that ChemComm (or its predecessor journals) have published over the last 100 years but we need help from the community in determining which articles have been the most influential.
Although Chemical Communications was officially launched in 1996, the roots of the journal go much further back through its predecessors – all the way to 1862 with the Journal of the Chemical Society. In the last 100 years, we’ve published close to 100000 articles, with well over 1000 of these articles coming from Nobel laureates alone!
Trying to determine which articles have been the most influential is going to be a massive challenge which will require the help of the entire chemical community – after all, the community is the best judge of what has been truly influential.
We think we’ve managed to come up with some examples of papers that we feel have been significant enough to deserve a Viewpoint:
- Hideki Shirakawa, Edwin J. Louis, Chwan K Chiang, Alan J Heeger and Alan G MacDiarmid’s 1977 communication reporting the first electrically conductive polymers.
- Neil Bartlett’s publication in 1962 reporting the world’s first noble gas compound, xenon hexafluoroplatinate.
- Mathias Brust, Merryl Walker, Donald Bethell, David J. Schiffrin and Robin Whyman’s 1994 communication on the functionalisation of gold nanoparticles with a thiol coating on the surface – ChemComm’s most cited paper of all time!
- Geoffrey Wilkinson’s 1965 paper reporting a rhodium catalyst for the hydroformylation of alkenes.
Our hope is that the Viewpoint articles will really engage our readers from across the chemical sciences and will shed a personal light on some truly influential chemistry that we have published over the last 10 decades!
We would love it if you could e-mail us or tweet us (@ChemCommun) your suggestions of which articles (or even small group of seminal articles on one subject) from 1912 onwards, have been key to the development or history of chemistry.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
History of Chemical Communications 1862 – Present
Journal of the Chemical Society (1862 – 1877)
Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions (1878 – 1925)
Journal of the Chemical Society (resumed) (1926 – 1965)
Chemical Communications (London) (1965-1968)
Journal of the Chemical Society D: Chemical Communications (1969 – 1971)
Journal of the Chemical Society, Chemical Communications (1972-1995)
Chemical Communications (1996 – Present).
