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What Does “Important New Physical Insights” Mean? Tips for Writing Better Papers his editorial is the first in a series that will be published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A/B/C (JPC) concerning a key question to the success in getting papers published: Does the work provide important new physical insights concerning the problem being studied? This issue is at the heart of what the editors look for when deciding if a submitted manuscript should be reviewed in JPC, and it is also a question that we ask reviewers to comment on in their reviews. And ultimately the lack of important new physical insights is the most common reason why papers are not published in the Journal. Our goal in this series of editorials is therefore to provide perspectives on what “important new physical insights” means to our editors. Since all of our editors are also authors, the perspectives provided are reflective of what is the current state of the field of physical chemistry. In many respects, the issue of important new physical insights is something that needs to be thought about at the very beginning of a research project. Such questions as “What is the current state of a subdiscipline?”, “What are key unanswered questions?”, and “When are there opportunities for making new advances?” all lead to the issue of important new physical insights that might be obtained by pursuing a line of research. Admittedly, research can have unexpected twists and turns, and sometimes the insights only become apparent well into an investigation. However, ultimately, the issue of “When to publish?” is largely dictated by answering the question “Do we have important new physical insights to report?”. Moreover, if the answer to this question is “No” then most likely JPC is not the right journal to consider, even when there might be results that are worthy of publication that have been generated in the project. Assessing whether important new physical insights have resulted from a project is very much dependent on subdiscipline. Some fields of inquiry are relatively immature, and almost everything done in the field is new, while other fields have been pursued for a long time, and important new physical insights need to be assessed in the context of what has already been published. Advances in technology or methods also play into this issue, as what might be new and interesting when a new technology or method just appears can become routine very quickly when the technology or method becomes widely adopted. As an example of the evolution of a subdiscipline, consider the evolution of research concerning the “computational electrodynamics” field (i.e., solving Maxwell’s equations to determine optical and other related properties). This field has become very popular in the last 20 years as a result of its relevance to the optical properties of plasmonic nanoparticles (i.e., silver and gold nanostructures). Twenty years ago, this was an immature field, as the methods and software needed to model the optical properties of metal nanoparticles were still under development. Indeed, most groups wrote their own codes and early papers emphasized methods development more than applications. In addition, the experimental techniques for
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making silver and gold nanostructures with controlled morphologies were not very sophisticated, and there were fundamental misunderstandings about such issues as the presence or absence of water droplets on the exposed nanoparticle surfaces under ambient humidity. Also, there were very few measurements of single particle optical properties, and even fewer in which optical properties were directly correlated with particle structure measurements. Instead, the measurements of ensembles of nanoparticles involved unknown effects associated with heterogeneous populations. Only a handful of computational electrodynamics papers were published concerning anisotropic particle optical properties, but many of these papers reported results of significant interest to everyone in the field, as they reported new techniques or key theory/experiment comparisons that moved the entire research area forward. In contrast to this situation, today this field is much more mature. On the computational side, there are now commercial software packages that make the computation of optical properties for anisotropic plasmonic nanostructures relatively routine, and there is much less new methods development work. Also, the synthesis and characterization capabilities on the experimental side are much more sophisticated, so issues of ensemble averaging, or of unknown particle−particle or particle−substrate interactions, are much less common. This has raised the bar for what constitutes important new physical insights significantly, and papers that present routine calculations on hypothetical structures, or that result in properties that are only incrementally different from what has already been published, are often rejected without review. The field is still very active, however, as there are applications that couple the plasmonic particle properties to other processes (photochemistry, imaging, carrier production) that have taken over as new “immature” topics of interest in this field. There are many other subdisciplines where the discussion presented above concerning computational electrodynamics applies in some sense. Over the coming months, we will be publishing a series of editorials, written by our editors, to provide examples that cover the most common occasions where the issue of “important new physical insights” comes up. The goal is to provide authors with examples across physical chemistry that they can use in assessing the appropriateness of their manuscripts for publication in the Journal. Let me note, however, that the diversity of activity in physical chemistry is extremely broad, and one of the virtues of this field is that new subdisciplines are constantly appearing. Thus, the ideas and opinions expressed in this series are only meant to be representative of what is relevant to JPC in 2017, rather than providing a list that will never change. We hope this is a useful discussion.
George C. Schatz, Editor-in-Chief
Published: May 18, 2017 3627
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.7b04302 J. Phys. Chem. A 2017, 121, 3627−3628
The Journal of Physical Chemistry A
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
George C. Schatz: 0000-0001-5837-4740 Notes
The author declares no competing financial interest.
3628
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.7b04302 J. Phys. Chem. A 2017, 121, 3627−3628
