Comment pubs.acs.org/est
Announcing Environmental Science & Technology Letters Urgency is a relative metric like “quality” and “newsworthiness”. ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson-Reuters) tries to measure it by the journal “Immediacy Index” which indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited. The Immediacy Index is calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year (e.g., 2011) by the number of total articles published in the journal that year. ES&T already does very well in this regard with a journal Immediacy Index of 0.814 compared to the Aggregate Immediacy Index of 0.451 for all journals in the Environmental Sciences category and 0.569 for those in the Environmental Engineering category. But we want to do even better, and ES&T Letters affords us an opportunity to do so. One can imagine a future where researchers publish immediately upon completion of the work. Information seems to be impatient and cannot waitit is already streaming from our mobile devices. Of course, one potential pitfall with that scenario is ensuring that the content is accurate and authoritative amidst the haste, and that is the job of the editors. I have appointed one of the foremost researchers in environmental science and engineering, Dr. Bruce Logan, as Deputy Editor, to lead ES&T Letters. He has served previously as Associate Editor for ES&T, and I can ensure you that he is committed to the outstanding success of ES&T Letters. But what’s in it for you, our authors? To some extent, each publication is “urgent” because it affects careerspromotions, patents, tenure, salary increments, and proposal success. That is another kind of “urgency”that needed for authors to quickly share content with colleagues, the public, and even supervisors. So what are you waiting for? The submission site is open. Send your next best, urgent, brief paper or short review (
