Physicallchemical Reference Data and Brevity
I
n the past, ESbT has published research articles that report physical and chemical reference data that may be of use to environmental scientists and engineers. In the future, we will refer the authors of these papers to other journals such as the Journal of Chemical and Physical Reference Data (JCPRD), published by the American Chemical Society. We take this action not because we wish to diminish the value of this data, but because there is growing competition for space in the research section of ESbT. Indeed, we acknowledge that highquality chemical/physical data on chemical substances are essential to good model building in order to understand environmental processes. However, papers that report only values of molecular parameters such as Henry’s law constants, octanol-water partition coefficients, and the like, without fitting these into a model will not be accepted for publication in ESbT. Such papers are more appropriate for journals such as JCPRD, and eventually, for electronic databases. When I became editor of ESbT in 1988, we were receiving between 300 and 350 submissions each year. By 1992 that figure had grown to 574. As I write this, I am told that 1993 submissions are outpacing 1992 by 17%. Moreover, the papers appear to be at least of equal quality to those received in previous years. In response to this pressure, we have increased the number of pages in the research section significantly over the past three years. The total number of pages grew from 1892 in 1990 to 2565 in 1992. We cannot continue to grow at this pace, however; there are limits to the size of the research section that can be justified given our current subscription rate. We are therefore taking the action referred to in this editorial and, in addition, our technical editors are looking more carefully than ever at the length of papers. We feel that many authors are not sensitive enough to the need to be efficient in the composition of their papers. Too often, they include introductory sections that approach a review of the subject. More commonly, they expound in the Discussion section far in excess of that justified by the data or new concepts that they ~
001 3-936X/93/0927-991$04.00/0 0 1993 American Chemical Society
present in the paper. Although a reasonable amount of speculation is stimulating, we will encourage authors in the future to keep the size of their papers within five printed pages, if possible. We hope by these measures to continue to publish more papers that describe the most important research results that are relevant to the environmental science and engineering community.
Harnessing Biotechnology for the21stcentury
P
resenting the proceedings of the Ninth International Biotechnology Symposium, this new volume offers the most recent developments in biotechnology and bioprocessing from leading industrial and academic researchers. The volume’s 139 papers are divided into 11 sections covering 0 Frontiers in Polypeptide Production 0 Frontiers in Productionof Metabolites 0 Microbiology and Physiology Biocatalysis and Biotransformation Bioreactor Engineering 0 Downstream Processing 0 Bioinstrumentation and Bioprocessing Control Policy Issues in Biotechnology 0 EnvironmentalEngineeringand Biology Agriculture and Food Biotechnology Biotechnologyin DevelopingCountries Harnessing Biotechnology for the Zlst Century is a valuable, concise resource on the latest international developments in biotechnology. Michael R. ladisch, Purdue University, Editor Arindam Bose, Pfizer Central Research, Editor Conference Proceedings Series 640 pages (1992) Clothbound ISBN 0-8412-2477-3
$149.95
Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 27,No. 6,1993 991
