380
CORRESPONDENCE On Communications In a recent humorous editorial (July issue), my good friend Professor David Ginsburg makes the case that the authors of Communications should follow them with papers containing “full” experimental details. This view is widely held, but misses the point. If the Editors of primary journals simply saw to it that a paper served ita purpose in the most concise way possible, they would certainly reject most (but not all) “full papers”. If an author really needs much more than 2000 words to tell his peers what is novel and conceptually interesting about his work, something usually (but not always) is very wrong somewhere. The claim is that some work is hard to repeat without the details available in a full paper. All that says is that editors and referees should make sure that a paper, whatever its length, reports the details which knowledgeable workers in the particular area would find necessary to repeat the work. Anyway, if a paper possesses the novelty that makes it publishable, it is clearly in the author’s interest that the work be repeatable. But, it is said, what could be wrong with forcing the authors of a ”Communication” (often gratuitously called a “Preliminary Communication”) into publishing more details? Well, it is wrong to make anyone waste time in
0001-4842/82/0115-0380$01.25/0
pointless activities. There is another, pragmatic, way to look at the question: are there many cases of important concepts or methods that, because they were published “only” in Communication form, failed to become part of the texture of chemistry? In my own field of organic chemistry, I doubt it. If I may be allowed a first-hand illustration, we reported, in 1968, the first example of the regiospecific formation of a carbon-carbon bond by trapping the enolate derived by 1,4 addition of an organometallic reagent to an enone. This consisted of two lines in a paper in Pure and Applied Chemistry reporting the synthesis of lycopodine. The wide subsequent use of the process by the chemical community shows that no damage was done by not publishing what I think would have been a redundant “full” paper. In general, history shows that if the work is sufficiently stimulating, others will be happy to provide further examples, possibly claiming that the earlier disclosures were “only published in preliminary form” or that “no further details have appeared”. That, however, is another story. Gilbert Stork Department of Chemistry Columbia University New York, New York 10027
0 1982 American Chemical Society
