Imagination, insight and innovation

In an Editorial published in the Analyst last year (2002, 127 (5), iii) we emphasised that your editorial staff and Advisory Board are continuously striving to enhance the quality of the journal. As part of this commitment to our readers, we introduce in the present issue a new component of the Analyst we have termed the I-Section (“I” for imagination, insight and innovation). The goal is to collect together in one place all the more general and topical elements of the journal in an attractive format. Included will be an Editorial perspective, a Forum, Highlights, an Education section, Reviews of the Tutorial and Critical variety, a People/Laboratory Profile, Enhanced Book Reviews and a Conference Diary.

The Editorial perspectives will be written at a more philosophical level either on a particular aspect of analytical science or on a topic of relevance to the analytical chemistry community. The source of this piece will originate from your Advisory Board or by invitation from selected individuals. The Forum component will define a challenging research problem for analytical scientists. We envisage that this article will, more often than not, stem from ideas and problems faced by our colleagues in other scientific and engineering disciplines. The fervent hope is that this exciting feature will lead to a dialogue between analytical scientists and those individuals who have analytical measurement needs that are, at the time of publication, unsatisfied. With respect to Highlight articles the approach will be very similar to the existing Highlight papers which deal with highly topical reviews of very recent work in specific subject areas. As a reminder to our readers, these articles should be of a critical nature and contain a small amount of speculation with regard to future perspectives. Similarly, the new I-Section will contain the more traditional Critical and Tutorial Review papers. These will be solicited by invitation and contain the usual material that describes a particular facet of analytical science in some detail. Incorporated will be a discussion of the state of a specific topic including an evaluation of where the particular field is heading.

An additional innovation in the I-Section will be the inclusion of an Education section where we anticipate a short didactic summary of a topic that is written in a tutorial style. The article will be targeted at individuals new to the field or non-analytical scientists, who are particularly interested in learning about a modern area of analytical science. An invited expert in the field will prepare the paper. Although not mandatory we will advise the writer to produce the article by considering why the subject is important for the analytical scientist, what is the basis of the particular approach, and where is the most relevant literature. Using this protocol we hope that these Education articles will maintain a level of uniformity. The Profile section will describe the research activities of selected analytical scientists, including a short biography. Included will be the thoughts of the individual profiled through answers to a variety of posed questions. In terms of a new approach to the Book Reviews, in addition to the conventional comments prepared by one reviewer, we will initiate the review of a collection of related textbooks by an expert panel. Together with their collective comments the panel will be asked to rank the merits of the considered texts. Finally, there will be a new enhanced Conference Diary component that will describe meetings that may be highly relevant to analytical scientists but that may be considered at the outset to be peripheral to the field.

Currently it is planned for the calendar year 2003 to publish four issues of the I-Section at three-monthly intervals. Readers can be assured that all research articles of whatever stripe appearing in the section will be subject to referee scrutiny in the usual manner. At the end of 2003 we will be soliciting opinions of readers and publishing authors alike as to the merits or otherwise of the section. In the meantime your Editor of the section welcomes comments from readers in an on-going fashion and suggestions for topics to be included in future issues of the journal. Contact information can be found on the inside cover of the journal and RSC web-site at www.rsc.org/analyst.

Scientific Editor, I-SectionMichael Thompson

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