Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
Mass Spectrometry: Reflections across Twenty-Six Years with Analytical Chemistry
N
ext month I will wrap up twenty-six years as an associate editor for Analytical Chemistry with primary responsibilities in the area of mass spectrometry. These twenty-six years have been a period of enormous growth for mass spectrometry. Two colleagues shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for advances in ionization techniques that facilitate mass analysis of polar and heavy samples, and during this time mass spectrometrists laid the foundations for the new fields of proteomics, glycomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, mass spectrometry-based bioinformatics, and even paleo-proteomics. We have successfully applied our technologies to the exhaustive analysis of petroleum fractions, molecular imaging, clinical microbiology, disease biomarkers, protein topology, and the exploration of biopolymer complexes. Mass spectrometry is also used to support drug development, monitor food safety, and in forensics and doping analyses. As Robert Cotter often observed, “Everything has a mass.” And truly, mass measurements are impacting fields all across the spectrum of science as well as in our daily lives. Simplistically stated, our mass analyzers have evolved from “bigger is better” to “faster is better.” Electronic analyzers have brought rapid scanning and ultrahigh resolution to the masses. Small portable instruments are now available. Orthogonal capabilities have been leveraged by new interfaces to capillary and two-dimensional HPLC, capillary electrophoresis, microfluidics, ion mobility, and cell sorting, among others. New ion chemistries, irradiation, and surface collisions activate ions for tandem experiments. The ever improving automation of instrument operation, data processing, and spectral interpretation continues to increase analytical speed, facilitate multiplexing, and allow new kinds of tandem experiments. We have advanced our understanding of the fundamentals of both ionization and fragmentation. Sales of commercial instruments have increased sharply, estimated, for example, at $0.65 billion in 2001 (source, BioPerspectives) and $3.9 billion in 2013 (source, MarketsandMarkets.com) and so have the annual numbers of publications in the field. I expect that this rapid evolution in technology, progress in fundamentals, and the expansion of mass measurements to important new fields of application will continue well into the next twenty-six year period. It is a good time to be a mass spectrometrist. Ninety-one percent of the mass spectrometry papers ever published in Analytical Chemistry appeared during my tenure. Figure 1 shows the number of articles published every year in Analytical Chemistry that are classified as mass spectrometry by Web of Science. These increased from 68 in 1990 to 553 in 2014. Interestingly, mass spectrometry papers constitute 12% of the total articles in Analytical Chemistry in 1990 and 33% in 2014. Annual increases in citations to these articles (Figure 2) exceed the growth in the number of publications, rising from 400 in 1991 to 30 078 in 2014. The top cited paper among all those published in Analytical Chemistry between 1990 and 2015 is “Mass spectrometry sequencing of proteins from silver © 2015 American Chemical Society
Figure 1. Number of mass spectrometry articles published by year in Analytical Chemistry 1990−2014. Plotted using data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
Figure 2. Number of annual citations to mass spectrometry articles published in Analytical Chemistry 1990−2014. Plotted using data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
stained polyacrylamide gels” published in 1996 by Shevchenko, Wilm, Vorm, and Mann. The second most cited mass spectrometry paper, fourth among all papers in the journal in this time period, is “Empirical statistical model to estimate the accuracy of peptide identifications made by MS/MS and database search” by Keller, Nesvizhskii, and Kolker, 2002. These contributions exemplify many that have been seminal to the development of proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry provide 6 of the top 10, 13 of the top 20, and 27 of the top 100 most-cited papers published in the journal from 1990 to 2015. A quick calculation from information given above indicates that the overall number of articles published annually in Analytical Chemistry has more than tripled during the last 26 years, facilitated by ACS’s development of Paragon Plus to provide automated tracking of manuscripts and by the journal’s move in 2009 to primarily electronic publication. The numbers of submissions have increased even faster in this time period, supported by the expansion of associate editors from five in 1990 to 17. Published: November 3, 2015 10657
DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b03951 Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 10657−10658
Analytical Chemistry
Editorial
As I leave I want to thank the three inspirational editors-inchief with whom I have workedGeorge Morrison (1980− 1990), Royce Murray (1991−2011) and Jonathan Sweedler (2012−). I thank the Managing Editors who supported the journal during my service, and especially the current Managing Editor Antonella Mazur, who provided some of the numbers included here. I want to acknowledge the critical support of Sue McCain and Sara Moran, my editorial assistants. However, my most heart-felt appreciation goes to the many, many colleagues who have provided prompt and insightful reviews of manuscripts submitted by their peers. Peer review is the essence of scientific publication and, as Carl Djerassi once said, “Research is not finished until it has been peer-reviewed and published.”
■
Catherine Fenselau
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
10658
DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b03951 Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 10657−10658
