e d i to ri a l
This Journal’s A-Page Foundation I
am writing this Editorial to salute my colleagues in the Washington, DC, offices of Analytical Chemistry. They help to make this journal the finest in the field. Analytical Chemistry is a hybrid publication (like Environmental Science & Technology, Science, and Nature) in that we co-publish news and advertisements of interest to our scientific communities, Reports on significant advances in the fields, and original research papers. To manage, direct, and exert quality control over this mixture of activities requires a special blend of editorial talents—one in which the A-Page Editors, who are trained in science and science journalism, report news and feature articles, while the research scholar Associate Editors at various institutions around the world evaluate research manuscript submissions. We also receive extremely important advice from our Advisory Board and A-Page Panel members. The unique success over the years of Analytical Chemistry’s service to its constituency is based, I believe, on a blend of hard work by extremely capable folks in all these arenas. I thank them all, but here I want to highlight the Editors responsible for our A-Page section. I believe that this is the first Editorial in the journal to do so, and it’s about time! I have been fortunate during my time as Editor to have been associated with three extremely capable Managing Editors of Analytical Chemistry—Mary Warner, Alan Newman, and (since January) Elizabeth Zubritsky. These talented folks have over the years brought an immeasurable level of creativity to the leadership of the A-Pages, following the high standard set by Josephine Petruzzi in the journal’s earlier years. The Managing Editor directs the work of the five A-Page Editors, all of whom hold professional degrees ranging from the B.S. to the Ph.D. level (half have the latter degree) and who have complementary and contemporary areas of specialty expertise. Their breadth of expertise enables the staff to cover the news and to select and evaluate the wide range of Reports and suggestions
© 2004 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
of prospective authors made by our A-Page Panel. Their specialties include microchips and bioanalysis (Zubritsky); environmental and food analysis and separations (Britt Erickson); MS and bioanalysis (Katie Cottingham), forensic analysis (Wilder Damian Smith), and microscopy and biopolymers (Raj Mukhopadhyay). Felicia Wach works particularly on helping to shape and edit the Reports as they come in, along with copy editors Elizabeth Wood and Kelley Carpenter and art director Julie Farrar. You can read more about their backgrounds on our webpage (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/ancham-a/staffbios.html). Readers of the Analytical Chemistry A-Pages have access not only to our own well-chosen state-of-the-art Reports but also to news of what’s happening in our discipline around the country and world. The A-Page Editors act as reporters in the true sense of the word, interviewing scientists and traveling, but they produce stories with more technical accuracy and less sensationalism than what characterizes the general press. I hope that this is appreciated. In the news briefs known as Analytical Currents, they also report on significant new research published in other journals. This is not to congratulate those journals, since we would rather have published that work ourselves, but to alert our readers to other papers worth reading. And periodically, the A-Page Editors write Product Reviews that assess the state of the art in commercial instrumentation in selected areas. This brief synopsis is a vast over-simplification of how things work, but it serves my purpose of making our A-Page organization and range of expertise more transparent to our readers and describing the important roles of the A-Page Editors in making this the leading journal that it is. Both Elizabeth Zubritsky and I are open to our readers’ suggestions to make it even better.
M A R C H 1 , 2 0 0 4 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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