Editorial - Changing for the Better - American Chemical Society

pages, and this system is now being used for Chemical. Research in ... costs to theACS (with no increase in subscription prices), but each article wil...
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JULY/AUGUST 1992 VOLUME 5, NUMBER 4 0 Copyright 1992 by the American Chemical Society

Editorial Changing for the Better If you are a regular reader of Chemical Research in Toxicology, you may notice a few subtle changes in this issue. These are not the first changes we have made to the Journal, and they probably won’t be the last. As our readers and Editorial Advisory Board identify ways to improve Chemical Research in Toxicology, we try to implement their suggestions. For example, you undoubtedly noticed that we expanded the size of Communications to the Editor last year to give authors the opportunity to include more experimental detail. We felt this was important to ensure rigor in data presentation and to provide authors a chance to adequately describe their most exciting findings. The response to this change has been very positive, and in the current issue we are adding Abstracts to the Communications. We are also changing the typeface of the titles and the table of contents from Helvetica to New Century Schoolbook. We are doing this to provide a more uniform appearance to the Journal and also because the Editor likes the look of New Century Schoolbook better than that of Helvetica. Some of our changes reflect technological innovation at the American Chemical Society. For a couple of years we have been printing articles in continuous fashion. The ACS is gradually converting its journals to a pagecomposition system that begins all articles at the top of pages, and this system is now being used for Chemical Research in Toxicology. This will cost a bit more in page costs to the ACS (with no increase in subscription prices), but each article will be self-contained, which should make reprintalook better. The ACS recently made another technological change that our readers will not see but which will improve the Journal: the introduction of a new computer system for the cataloging and tracking of

manuscripts. This Macintosh-based system, which was developed using Chemical Research in Toxicology as the beta-test site, is easy to use and very flexible. It speeds the work of the Editorial Office, which should make it possible for us to turn manucripts around even faster than we already do. Change is a reflection of evolution, and Chemical Research in Toxicology is evolving in a very positive fashion. Submissions, subscriptions, and published pages are increasing steadily, and as we approach the end of our fifth year, the outlook is very bright. Chemical Research in Toxicology is widely recognized as a primary forum for the publication of high-quality articles on the molecular basis of toxicology. One reflection of this is its impact factor, which is calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information as a measure of the average number of times each article published in a given year is subsequently cited. The impact factors for Volumes 1 and 2 of Chemical Research in Toxicology place it a t the top of all primary journals in the field of toxicology (from a total of 40).Only two journals in the field of toxicology have higher impact factors, and they both publish only reviews, which are always very heavily cited. In fact, Chemical Research in Toxicology’s impact factor ranks it fifth among primary American Chemical Society journals. We are very proud of what Chemical Research in Toxicology has accomplished in a short five years, and we look forward to continued evolution. If you have any ideas about ways we can improve, please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office or a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. Lawrence J. Marnett Editor

Q893-228~/92/27Q5-0449$03.QQIQ 0 1992 American Chemical Society