And the award goes to…

Posted on 19 Dec 2006 by Stuart Cantrill

It’s that time of year when people tend to reflect on the best (and worst) of the last 12 months – and the topic of chemistry is no exception.

As usual, Chemical & Engineering News has released its highlights of the year.

If, however, you feel that a particularly outstanding piece of work has been left off the list, don’t worry, you can nominate it for a Chemmy Award over at ChemBark – go have a look at the categories and decide who is deserving of such an honour.

There is no doubt that chemical blogging has become very popular over the year, so with that in mind, go and vote for your favourite chemistry blog of the year at Chemical Forums. Although it is no longer with us, my vote goes to Tenderbutton.

Seasons’ greetings to all – and happy new year.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

The J-factor

Posted on 15 Dec 2006 by Stuart Cantrill

(UPDATE: apparently Thomson ISI have already thought of this – you can calculate an h-index for any search – journal, author, keywords, etc… – you do on Web of Science)

I’ve been mulling this one over for a while. It may mean nothing, it may mean something, I’ll let you decide.

You may have heard of the h-index, it is the highest number of papers a scientist has published that have each received at least that number of citations, i.e., if 20 of your publications each have at least 20 citations, your h-index is 20 (to get up to an h-index of 21, not only does your 21st paper need to receive 21 citations, but all of those other 20 papers – each with at least 20 citations – need to reach 21 cites as well). So, as you can see, increasing your h-index just one point is not necessarily an easy thing to do, and the bigger the number, the harder it is to increase (at least that’s how I see it).

All in all, it seems to be a measure of consistency – rather than just considering the number of papers someone has published – which may include many mediocre ones that are rarely cited – the h-index takes into account how much impact a body of work has made in the community, based on citations.

It got me thinking. How about doing this for journals? Yes, we have the impact factor and associated numerical wizardry, but does that measure consistency (it may well do, I’m just asking…). As you probably know, the impact factor for a journal for any given year, let’s say 2004, is calculated by dividing the total number of citations received in 2004 for all papers published in that journal for the preceding 2 years (i.e., 2002 and 2003) by the total number of papers from that period. So, if The Journal of Marvellous Research published a total of 100 papers in the period 2002-2003, and in 2004 those papers are cited a total of 1500 times, its impact factor is 15.

Here’s my problem with that – what if most of those 1500 citations come from two or three review articles? Or five or six really good primary research papers? In other words, perhaps The Journal of Marvellous Research has published a few gems, but the rest is not quite up to scratch? So, how about an h-index for journals – the J-factor?

So, I thought I’d do a little bit of number crunching. Let’s look at three journals as a comparison. JACS from the ACS, Angewandte from Wiley and ChemComm from the RSC.

Let’s look at the five-year period from 2000-2004 and calculate a J-factor, i.e., the highest number of articles the journal has published during that time which each have at least J citations.

Here are the results:

JACS 133 (papers published 13,606)

Angewantde 114 (papers published 5,423)

ChemComm 75 (papers published 6,655)

Here are the impact factors for 2005 by comparison:

JACS 7.419

Angewantde 9.596

ChemComm 4.426

So, JACS has a lower impact factor than Angewandte, but a higher J-factor… does this mean anything? I’m not sure. Obviously JACS published far more papers, but that is not necessarily a measure of quality – after all, ChemComm published more papers than Angewandte in that five-year span, but has a significantly lower J-factor than Angewandte.

Just to be cheeky, here are the 2000-2004 J-factors for two other journals:

Nature 301 (papers published 13,679)

Science 287 (papers published 13,433)

…and compare this to the 2005 impact factors:

Nature 29.273

Science 30.927

So, I’m not really sure what this all means, if anything. The J-factor is a constantly shifting metric, the 2000-2004 J-factors for all of these journals may be different tomorrow, likely different next week, and certainly different next year. Will they change in proportion to one another? That’s something else to watch.

And remember, you can prove anything with statistics…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Click click bang bang

Posted on 07 Dec 2006 by Joshua Finkelstein

Banert et al. recently published the first synthesis of tetraazidomethane (and some of its “exciting chemistry”). Like it’s cousin triazidomethane, this compound is highly reactive/explosive:

Safety Precautions: Tetraazidomethane (1) is extremely dangerous as a pure substance. It can explode at any time – without a recognizable cause. Less than a drop … is able to destroy completely not only the glass trap but also the vacuum Dewar flask of the cooling bath.

It looks like it’s a lot easier to make than octanitrocubane, so we’ll just have to hope that there aren’t any terrorists out there who subscribe to ACIE… (As an aside, I don’t think there are any official policies for papers that contain explosive chemical reagents, but when it comes to biological papers that contain information that could be exploited by terrorists, many journals “”https://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/10/5575">have a policy in which editors will screen and, if necessary, reject manuscripts submitted for publication if ‘an editor … conclude(s) that the potential harm of publication outweighs the potential societal benefits.’")

Though this study sounds somewhat esoteric at first, when tetraazidomethane was reacted with norbornene, the authors isolated two unexpected 5-aminotetrazole derivatives (see Scheme 2). The authors haven’t done a detailed mechanistic analysis yet, so a bit more work is needed to learn exactly what’s going on – in the meantime, I think this would be a great question to test your students’ (or friends’) arrow-pushing skills…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

My own, personal, Mr. Roboto

Posted on 04 Dec 2006 by Catherine Goodman

I’ve just been reading an interview with Marvin Minsky in today’s local newspaper about the future of artificial intelligence, and it got me thinking. His current premise is that emotions are not distinct from rational thought. Instead, they are complementary ways to interact with the world. The example he gives is that being angry is one way to deal with problems because you intimidate people or make them go away. Thus, problem solved!

He further goes on to suggest that once we know more about how emotions, or alternate thought resources in general, are hard-wired (in this rational, complementary way), we’ll be able to design robots who can also experience emotions.

Putting these two ideas together, I think that someone should be designing emotional robots that can deal with your problems. For some reason, I also think that they should be small enough to fit in your pocket and be pulled out in times of need, much like some of the characters in anime. They would also fly to the source of trouble with crazy faces and lines streaming out behind them to indicate how fast they are going (in case you don’t know what I mean, check this out).

The big question, though, is: what would these robots do that would be distinct from what normal robots might be capable of? My choices for now (one for each pocket) are: 1) a robot that is horrified at finding spiders inside that would take them away and 2) a robot that becomes angry at people littering (such as the woman on the way to the subway this morning) and convinces them of the importance of using trash cans.

What robots would you want?

Catherine (assistant editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Next week’s Novartis symposium…

Posted on 01 Dec 2006 by Joshua Finkelstein

If you live in the Boston area and you’re an organic chemist, you’ve probably heard about the upcoming Novartis Symposium on Advances in Organic Synthesis to honor Professor Dave Evans. (Thanks to Paul Bracher for this info.) It’s on Tuesday (December 5th) at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium and there’s an excellent lineup of speakers. I think you can still sign up (and it’s free…)

Kresge Auditorium is a stone’s throw away from the Miracle of Science Bar & Grill, so if I don’t bump into you during one of the breaks, keep an eye out for me at the end of the day – maybe we can grab a post-symposium pint…

Hope to see you there,