Lovely work, congrats Xin

Thanks, that was horrific.

Groan

Hydrogen-Bonded Networks from Poly(dimethylamidinium) Cations and Polycarboxylate Anions Two ditopic and one tetratopic dialkylamidinium-containing compounds were synthesized and their ability to form hydrogen-bonded networks or frameworks with polycarboxylate anions was studied. A series...

Also out this week, part of Meabh's Honours research project investing what happens when you add methyl substituents to amidinium groups and try to make HOFs from them. Weird stuff is what happens.

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Great to see this collaborative project led by @jona-foster.bsky.social reporting the first halogen-bonded nanosheets out: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Congrats to first author Prioti and the whole team.

Defining, designing and determining the structure of supramolecular frameworks Supramolecular frameworks, ordered porous networks assembled by noncovalent interactions, are a broad class of functional materials with emergent combinations of properties arising from the relatively...

Michael McGuirk and I wrote an tutorial review on supramolecular frameworks (hydrogen bonds, halogen bonds, chalcogen bonds etc) where we try to get everyone to agree on some common definitions for things. Might be a long shot!

Hopefully useful for new students.

pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Low Symmetry Cage Complexes Formed by Metalation of Symmetric Hexa‐Cationic Organic Cages Threefold symmetric hexa-cationic hydrazone cages coordinate a range of transition metal ions upon deprotonation. When the cage contains ethyl solubilising groups the expected threefold symmetric cag...

We have a new paper out with Annie Colebatch: we metalate 6+ hydrazone cages to give M3-cage metallocages with coordinatively unsaturated metal ions. Et solubilising groups give expected 3-fold symmetric metallocages. OMe or OPr give funky low-symmetry cages tinyurl.com/4ehppaex.

Very good thread on the silliness of impact factors.

To be honest I think there's a space for both. Some unis all online, some all in-person. If we are going to do online lectures though, why does every uni need to make their own? Why not just get a few good lecturers to make videos for everyone?

Or stop giving out lecture recordings to everyone? Could be given to people with a medical need, or to everyone in exam period?

I think you overestimate the political engaged-ness of the average voter and the inherent tendency to vote for a) who they voted for last time and/or b) one of the two majors by default.

I know you acknowledged that, so consider this a pointless response to your pointless punditry prediction.

Sadly I suspect you're right.

Yeh I agree. I think speed of publication is also one of the reasons materials journals have such IFs - it's quicker to turn work around than say a natural product synthesis or a protein evolution study.

Is this because they’re publishing more of the better papers? Or just focusing on highly cited areas? Or that people are getting lazy with their citing and just concentrating on JACS/Angew? Possibly all of the above?

So what does this all mean? Probably not much. The very top journals are cannibalising the next tier down as well as the subdiscipline-specific journals (JOC, Inorg. Chem. etc).

They’re cut off from my graph, but Nat. Chem. (22 --> 20) and Chem (20 --> 20) have stayed broadly similar. Nature (43 --> 49), Science (42 --> 46) have increased slightly.

Pleasingly this year, there are lots of papers that have been cited a few times, which seems more sustainable! (Each paper only contributes to IFs for the year it is published and the following year).

On a personal note, Supramol. Chem. has increased from 1.3 --> 2.6 in this time. This probably says something about the vagaries of IFs though: a couple of years ago, it was even higher (3.3), in that case largely based on one very highly-cited paper.

In both years, materials IFs >> inorganic > organic ~ phys chem.

My suspicion is that this is because these journals are publishing a lot of highly/rapidly citing materials chemistry, but I don’t really know. It could be the effects of being open access too, or that there is a lot of useful stuff in these journals.

The other journals that have improved a lot are RSC Adv., ACS Omega and Molecules. This means that the ACS and RSC “less-selective” journals now have higher IFs than e.g. JOC, Dalton, OBC. This isn’t just that they’re publishing more reviews.

JACS, Angew and Nat. Comm. are notable improvers, while what I would consider the next tier down from JACS/Angew (Chem. Sci., Chem. Comm. CEJ) have decreased quite a lot. That means the gap between JACS/Angew and the rest is pretty huge.

A graph comparing 2024 and 2019 journal impact factors.

IFs are clearly silly and game-able, and I don’t think they have that much of a correlation with “quality,” but it’s interesting (to me) to see how they’re changing over time. This chart compares 2019 and 2024 IFs: things above the black line have increased, below have decreased.

2024 journal impact factors are out, and I had a bit of a play around comparing the numbers with 2019 IFs. Bit of a thread to follow, but general trend seems to be most journal IFs are trending downward but JACS/Angew and big “less-selective” journals buck the trend.

Yeh it's weird here - everyone is nice but no one really engages much.

Although the next post in my timeline is a thread with loads of people debating how to capitalise UV-Vis...so maybe there's still hope?

Research Fellow - School of Chemistry - 105878 - Grade 7 To create and contribute to the creation of knowledge by undertaking a specified range of activities within an established research programme and/or specific research project.

We have a 3-year postdoc position available, starting in October, to work on molecular capsules for catalysis. Click on the link below to apply! 👇 Happy to have informal chats about the post - send me an email. Application deadline 6 July. edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... #chemsky

Annoyingly, the Chrome extension has been disabled (doesn't follow Chrome best practice guidelines, apparently).

Awesome, will give that a shot - thanks!

Does anyone tech-savvy know if there's a browser extension or something that get journals to just show me the normal pdf rather than their annoying epdfs?

Manually deleting the e from epdf in the web address and reloading is getting tedious.

#chemsky

😂😂😂 This one is in a good journal - it seems like someone from the editorial/production team should probably have caught it!