Author Archives: stu

Another 100 chemists on Twitter

Posted on November 14, 2016 by stu

After someone (Per-Ola Norrby, I think) pointed out that my original list of 100 chemists on Twitter is now down to 99 (there’s 100 in the blog post, but the Twitter list only has 99 members now that one of … Continue reading →

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On the nature of chemistry publishing

Posted on August 28, 2016 by stu

I’ve just returned from #ACSPhilly (the 252nd ACS meeting in Philadelphia) where I got to meet some awesome chemtweeps, many for the first time. This was my first ACS meeting since March 2009 (the one in Salt Lake City) which, … Continue reading →

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Credit where credit is due

Posted on March 14, 2016 by stu

Let me just flag up to those of you who aren’t aware of my day job, I’m the Chief Editor of Nature Chemistry; best I put that at the top of this post considering the subject matter… ***See updates at … Continue reading →

Posted in Journal stuff, Metrics, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

We need to talk about Twitter…

Posted on February 1, 2016 by stu

As part of Materials Week at the University of Warwick, I was asked to talk about social media and how it is used by scientists (and of course I threw in a bit about how journals use it too). Because … Continue reading →

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Imperfect impact

Posted on January 23, 2016 by stu

The problems with impact factors are well known – I could give you a long list of things to read that explain why, but just start with this blog post from Stephen Curry and go from there. I have a … Continue reading →

Posted in Metrics, Metrics-y stuff, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Chemistry journal citation distributions

Posted on December 10, 2015 by stu

Over at my day job, I recently looked at the distribution of citations that 2012 and 2013 Nature Chemistry papers (Articles, Reviews and Perspectives) received in 2014 – essentially the citations that are used to calculate the 2014 impact factor … Continue reading →

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Back to the future (of chemistry publishing)

Posted on October 21, 2015 by stu

So, here’s my obligatory Back-to-the-Future Day post and, because it is me doing this, it’s obviously about chemistry publishing. I figured I’d compare one issue of a journal published in 1985, with an issue published in 2015. Because the last … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnivals, Fun, History of science, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

All your base are belong to JACS

Posted on June 3, 2015 by stu

This is a follow-up post to yesterday’s that looked at word clouds made up from the titles of JACS papers from the last 115 years. Jake Yeston commented on Twitter about the lack of catalysis-based words in the clouds. This … Continue reading →

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115 years of JACS titles

Posted on June 2, 2015 by stu

When Nature Chemistry celebrated its 5th anniversary last year, we put together a word cloud (using Wordle) featuring the 150 words that appeared most often in the titles of the papers we had published up to that point. That was … Continue reading →

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The ups and downs of cyclohexane

Posted on May 7, 2015 by stu

Cyclohexane is undoubtedly an iconic molecule. Many of us learned to draw it (with varying degrees of proficiency) very early on in our organic chemistry classes as we were introduced to chairs, boats, half-chairs, twist-boats, cis, trans, A-values, conformation and, … Continue reading →

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