Editorial pubs.acs.org/JAFC
Progress Is Made by People − They Earn Our Recognition!
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s we begin the New Year, I want to extend my best wishes to the scholarly community of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (JAFC); with more than 1172 papers published, almost 2 million article requests, and more than 73000 citations in 2015, our authors, readers, and reviewers contributed to continue improving JAFC so it can best serve the needs of our society. Concurrent with changes to our scope, we redefined the journal sections in August 2015, and the new sections have been very well received. Now we are introducing an exciting new JAFC cover that reflects our multiscale scope from the macroscopic down to the molecular level along the agriculture−food−nutrition axis. Since my transition into the role of Editor-in-Chief one year ago, processing efficiency has further increased to reach an historic minimum of less than 75 days from submission to acceptance thanks to the hard work of the editors and their office staff, the reviewers, as well as our colleagues in ACS Publications. The rapid developments in agricultural and food science and technology and the changes in the scope of JAFC have mirrored adjustments to the Editorial team: The team of Associate Editors has been expanded by Prof. Holger Zorn (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany) in March 2015 to strengthen our expertise in the fields of molecular biotechnology, enzymology, and protein chemistry. Hanne Christine Bertram (Denmark) has completed 5 years of service and left the editorial board in December 2015. On behalf of the ACS staff and JAFC readers, I would like to thank Hanne for her excellent contributions and dedicated service to the journal over the past years. Zhen-Yu Chen (China), John W. Finley (USA), Chi-Tang Ho (USA), Yoshinori Mine (Canada), Russell Molyneux (USA), Peter Schieberle (Germany), Taka Shibamoto (USA), Veronika Somoza (Austria), Francisco Tomás-Barberán (Spain), Elizabeth Waters (Australia), and Liangli (Lucy) Yu (USA) have been elected to another term of service. To accommodate continued growth for JAFC, we were fortunate to add Prof. Qing X. Li (Figure 1) from the Environmental Biochemistry and Biotechnology Laboratory in
Figure 2. Neil Reese, South Dakota State University, USA, winner of the JAFC Research Article of the Year Award in food chemistry for 2014.
the Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering, University of Hawaii at Manoa, as a new Associate Editor of JAFC in November 2015. He received his Ph.D. in agricultural and environmental chemistry from the University of California at Davis (1990), followed by postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He joined the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1995 as an assistant professor and was tenured and promoted to an associate professor in 1999 and to a full professor in 2002. From 1995 to 2013, he acted as director of the pesticide residue chemistry laboratory and since 2011 has been director of the proteomics core facility of the university. Qing’s research has a focus in environmental biochemistry and biotechnology with special emphasis on analytical and environmental chemistry, the microbial transformation and environmental fate of agrochemicals, and new analytical and mass spectrometric tools used to tackle challenges in environmental biodegradation and biosynthesis. His research has resulted in over 270 peer-reviewed scientific publications. I am confident that he will fill another competence gap in our editorial board. Qing, welcome to our team! On behalf of ACS and the authors of JAFC, I would like to cordially thank all distinguished members of the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB), who are not continuing as EAB members, for their active engagement guiding the journal during their tenure: Robert Krieger (University of California, Riverside, USA), Rui Hai Liu (Cornell University, USA), Anne Meyer (Technical University of Denmark), Vishweshwaraiah Prakash (Central Food Technological Research Institute, India), Augustin Scalbert (World Health Organization), and Peter Winterhalter (University Braunschweig, Germany). Aiming at taking the journal into an even more successful future, I am pleased to announce some new EAB members who are supporting the Journal by providing timely reviews to the editors, giving our team advice from an author perspective, and helping us understand the needs of the agricultural and food science community: John Beck (Western Regional Research Received: December 3, 2015 Accepted: December 4, 2015 Published: December 4, 2015
Figure 1. Qing X. Li, University of Hawaii at Manoa, new Associate Editor of JAFC since November 2015. © 2015 American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.5b05739 J. Agric. Food Chem. 2016, 64, 1−3
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
Editorial
Figure 3. Outstanding reviewers (from left to right and top to bottom): Mirko Bunzel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany; Gordon McDougall, Scottish Crop Research Institute, United Kingdom; Fereidoon Shahidi, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; George Harrigan, Monsanto Product Safety Center, USA; Luke Howard, University of Arkansas, Food Science, USA; Zheng Li, University of Florida, Food Science and Human Nutrition Department, USA; Min-Hsiung Pan, National Taiwan University, Institute of Food Science and Technology, Taiwan; Eunyoung Park, Illinois Institute of Technology for Food Safety and Health, USA; Alexander Schauss, AIBMR Life Sciences, Inc., Natural and Medicinal Products Research, USA; Haiming Shi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Institute of Food and Nutraceutical Science, China.
the papers published in 2014 in a three-stage process of nomination, critical evaluation, and voting. Two outstanding papers, demonstrating creativity and impact on agricultural and food chemistry as a whole, have be awarded, one from each category: • Macherius, A.; Seiwert, B.; Schröder, P.; Huber, C.; Lorenz, W.; Reemtsma, T. Identification of plant metabolites of environmental contaminants by UPLCQToF-MS: the in vitro metabolism of triclosan in horseradish. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2014, 62, 1001−1009.
Center, USDA ARS, Albany, CA), Masha Niv (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), Laura Nyström (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Zhou Weibiau (National University of Singapore), and Jon Wong (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Washington, DC). Dear colleagues, the editors are proud to welcome you on board! To recognize the work of our best authors and to highlight their scientific achievements, JAFC together with the ACS Divisions of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (AGFD) and Agrochemicals (AGRO) introduced three years ago the JAFC Research Article of the Year Award. Once more, we have assessed 2
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.5b05739 J. Agric. Food Chem. 2016, 64, 1−3
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
Editorial
• Paudel, L.; Wyzgoski, F. J.; Giusti, M. M.; Johnson, J. L.; Rinaldi, P. L.; Scheerens, J. C.; Chanon, A. M.; Bomser, J. A.; Miller, A. R.; Hardy, J. K.; Reese, R. N. NMR-based metabolomic investigation of bioactivity of chemical constituents in black rasberry (Rubus occidentalis L.) fruit extracts. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2014, 62, 1989−1998. In honor of their outstanding scientific paper, Thorsten Reemtsma (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leibzig, Germany) and R. Neil Reese (Figure 2; Department of Biology and Microbiology, South Dakota State University, USA) were invited to give a lecture on their award-winning publications at the 250th ACS National Meeting, 16−20 August, in Boston, MA (USA), and were recognized with a plaque and an honorarium of $1000 each in addition to travel and lodging expenses. To ensure the excellence of papers that appear in JAFC like those recognized by the JAFC Research Article of the Year Award, our editors rely on high-quality, constructive, and timely reviews from the more than 15000 active reviewers in our database. We certainly acknowledge and appreciate the considerable effort and time referees dedicate to the scientific community and the decisive role they play in ensuring the quality of published papers. Feedback from our reviewer community has shown, however, that reviewers often feel their efforts go unnoticed without any further recognition. As part of our ongoing efforts to recognize and support our reviewer community and to express the editors’ gratitude to some of our best reviewers, JAFC has now introduced the JAFC Excellence in Review Award. The award is designed to recognize the valuable contribution that peer reviewers make to the development of academic papers and to scholarship in agricultural and food chemistry. Using a two-stage process, the top 100 reviewers were selected on the basis of the frequency and speed of reviews performed over the past year and, then, the editorial board hand-picked 10 award-winning reviewers whose efforts, dedication to quality, and professionalism have been considered outstanding in the past year. In recognition of the contribution that reviewers provide to the scientific community and the publication of scholarly research, the editors of JAFC are proud to recognize the following outstanding reviewers (Figure 3) for their significant contributions to the journal over the past year and acknowledge their achievements with a digital certificate of excellence. Encouraged by the immediate positive response from these top reviewers, we are exploring additional future initiatives to thank committed reviewers for their valued contributions and to retain them for future service to our scientific community. All together, we are looking forward to a productive 2016, and we hope that all of you, our authors, reviewers, readers, and advisors, have a prosperous and successful year!
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Thomas F. Hofmann, Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views fo the ACS. The authors declare no competing financial interest. 3
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.5b05739 J. Agric. Food Chem. 2016, 64, 1−3
