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CORRESPONDENCE Citation of Prior Discovery
What Do These Nobel Laureates Have in Common?
The editorial in the January (1984) issue of Accounts of Chemical Research on the evaluation of manuscipts and the letter of Dr. Felix Serratosa on reviewers prompts us to ask how, maintaining the review by peers, authors may somehow correct omission of their published work in the reference list not only of reviews but also of primary papers. A few months ago, a prestigious chemistry journal of the English-speaking world (not Accounts of Chemical Research) published a communication which presented facts concerning an exception to a well-known and generally accepted stereochemical rule. The authors claimed this to be the fiist published exception to this rule and did not offer an interpretation. In fact, exceptions had been published by us since 1972, and the facts and stereochemical interpretations have been reviewed as late as 1983, all this in Anglophone journals of comparable prestige. The authors of this letter pointed this out to the editors of the journal, but their policy was not to accept rebuttals for omissions in the list of references. This was not the omission of an isolated fact, or of a single contribution, but of a new interpretation of a stereochemical rule. We think that journals should devote some space to clarify this type of omission. Perhaps the author responsible for the omission could be consulted. We know that space is at a premium, but we also think that this should not be an obstacle to one of the basic principles in scientific communication, which is to give proper credit to those who have contributed to the development of a principle or rule. Neglecting this may give way to self-styled ”first interpretations” or “first findings”. We have omitted journals and fields because we want to stress the general principle and not to criticize a given author or editorial board. However, we can substantiate our statements.
I should have thought the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Evidently this is not a unique answer to the question which heads an advertisement recently published in ACS journals. The ad shows portraits of a dozen Nobel Laureates and furnishes its own answer to the question: ”They have all published articles in the journals of the American Chemical Society.” I whould prefer a less provincial approach in the advertising of journals representing the undisputed center of chemical publication. In addition, the ad inadvertently supports, by implication, a tendency which ought to be corrected. Thus, I want to exploit this case to cite a more important one. American colleagues ought to be aware of a feeling abroad, felt by many of us in the provinces, not only in Israel or in Japan but also in the countries of western Europe. It is felt that many (many, not all!) American colleagues do not read or scan journals other than those in the above-mentioned ad, certainly not journals published in other countries. Consequently they are less aware of, and hence fail to cite, work published in such “provincial” journals. I think this detracts from the value of their papers. They are narrower than they might have been. Chemists outside the United States cannot afford the “luxury” of analogous behavior owing to the preponderant importance of American chemistry as a whole. They have been reading the American journals, even before the appearance of the ad I have described. This places a responsibility upon those authors who lower the standard of these journals by omitting germane citations simply because they appear in “foreign” journals of which they are ignorant. I remind them that there are more things in heaven and earth than appear in their philosophy.
Osvaldo Cori*
David Ginsburg
Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel
Universidad de Chile Santiago I , Chile Derek V. Banthorpe
University College London, U.K. Martin J. 0. Francis
Neffield Department of Orthopedic Surgery Oxford, U.K.
0001-4842/84/0117-0346$01.50/0
0 1984 American Chemical Society
