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CORRESPONDENCE Is Your Publication Readable, Understandable, and Reproducible? Along with many organic chemistry colleagues (and no doubt other chemists) I am becoming increasingly concerned by vogues in ACS publishing recently. There is no doubt (as we are repeatedly reminded by advertisements) that ACS journals are at the top of most rankings of significance. However, in order to show an author’s status, several dubious features seem to have become a prerequisite: (a) A massive total synthesis of an esoteric natural product must be confined to one-half a page of JACS; (b) Experimental details are to be viewed as low-grade padding (for example after describing an evidently very useful chiral auxiliary a recent paper’ concludes ”.... we expect rapid and widespread acceptance of this new chiral auxiliary”. The method involves an enzyme-mediated hydrolysis, a technique unfamiliar to most organic chemists, and the experimental detail covered seven words!); (c) To show one’s command on the chemical literature, the first reference must be a composite of as many background papers as possible (useful when annotated but otherwise is it just for reasons of fashion?);
(d) Valuable new methods and reagents or the very effective and selective use of more established approaches must be as well hidden as posaible and insufficient details supplied except for yield-90% being a mandatory lower limit. This trend has, unfortunately, been spearheaded by some outstanding chemists. Not surprisingly their younger colleagues feel that such style is the acme of success and emulate them. I and others have often been frustrated by the apparent irreproducability of many evidently useful methods or spent long hours reoptimizing an “established” but incompletely explained technique. As an example of the very highest order of experimental clarity I would recommend any young publisher to look at the work of Barry Sharpless. Chemistry is still, despite computers, an experimental art-let’s publish it that way! (1) Whiteaell, J. K.;Chen, H.-H.; Lawrence, R.M.J. Org. Chern. 1985, 50, 4663.
0.Meth-Cohn National Chemical Research Laboratory Pretoria, South Africa
0001-4842/86/0119-0098$01.50/00 1986 American Chemical Society
