Category Archives: Publishing

Joy provision

The July 2017 issue of Nature Chemistry is the 100th and the Editorial celebrates this milestone. I decided to have a little fun while writing it and was inspired by this story from @Helena_LB about including song titles from Metallica’s … Continue reading

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Periodic prose

It is, apparently, #WorldPoetryDay (on Twitter at least) and the question of writing a scientific paper in poetry form cropped up again (it does every now and then). And when it does, I usually end up digging through the dusty … Continue reading

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Credit where credit is due

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

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Imperfect impact

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

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Back to the future (of chemistry publishing)

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

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All your base are belong to JACS

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

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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A silicon spoof

This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s (did you notice the date?) that looked at an April 1981 paper by Dietmar Seyferth and James J. Pudvin published in the (now defunct) ACS journal CHEMTECH. This article reports the isolation of … Continue reading

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Some surprising silicon chemistry

Ever since Scott Denmark told me about a gem of a paper back at the Bürgenstock conference a few years, I’ve been meaning to blog about it. Well, today is as good a day as any* I suppose, so here … Continue reading

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A quantitative analysis of how often Nature gives a fuck

After seeing this tweet the other evening: Huge respect to @CSPO_ASU's Dan Sarewitz for getting the one word sentence "Bollocks" into @nature http://t.co/AQC4hdENMC — Jack Stilgoe (@Jackstilgoe) February 6, 2015 I started to wonder just how sweary Nature has been … Continue reading

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