2014: NJC's editors review the past year and the year to come

As New Journal of Chemistry enters its 38th year of publication, we are delighted to once again address this New Year's message to our readers. What is NJC and who are we? What have we done and what will be new this year? We invite you to read on for the answers to these questions.

Presenting NJC

Editorial offices

New Journal of Chemistry is a general chemistry journal that belongs to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Founded in 1977, the journal has been published by contract with the Royal Society of Chemistry since 1998. The main editorial office is based in Montpellier, France, while production of the journal is assured by the Royal Society of Chemistry from its Cambridge office.

Currently there are 7 editors who handle submitted manuscripts:

• Dr Denise Parent and Dr Eva Balentova are the full-time CNRS staff in the Montpellier office;

• Editorial Board members Prof. Peter Junk in Australia and Prof. Jaïrton Dupont in Brazil serve as associate editors;

• three CNRS researchers (Dr Ling Peng, Dr Yannick Guari and Dr Laurent Vial) carry out editorial duties on a part-time basis.

The team of editors at the Royal Society of Chemistry includes Dr Jamie Humphrey, Dr Fiona McKenzie, Dr Gisela Scott and Rachel Jones.

Editorial scope and policy

NJC seeks to publish high quality papers that can potentially interest a broad readership within the chemistry research community. We are particularly interested in papers that combine chemistry with other disciplines, such as medicine, physics, materials, or show the applications of chemistry in other fields such as archeology or art history.

Like many journals today, NJC carries out a pre-peer-review evaluation of all submitted manuscripts. As of March 2013, the decision to return a manuscript to the authors without peer review requires the approval of both an editor and an editorial board member (usually the one whose expertise is the closest to that covered by the manuscript). Both the content and the presentation of the manuscript are considered. The significance of the results and the suitability of the presentation for a general chemistry audience are evaluated to determine if the manuscript will undergo full peer review by specialists.

Publication formats

The 4 formats published in NJC are summarised in Chart 1. Authors can publish their original research in two formats: short Letters and longer Papers, with no criteria regarding urgency. Two review formats are also proposed, the 6-page Focus and the longer Perspective. The October 2010 and January 2013 editorials (free to access, DOI: 10.1039/c005530c and 10.1039/c2nj90049a) give further details about the formats and the journal's editorial policy.

Chart 1 NJC formats.

A Focus review presents, in a short form (6 pages), a personal view of a topic that will interest a broad readership. Their short length is designed to make them readable by all chemists and scientists in related fields. These contributions give a concise introduction of the topic covered, including key achievements and perspectives, drawing on a limited number of references to the most important papers. Focus reviews are not meant to be an exhaustive survey of the literature but are short, informative, useful and attractive to readers.

The longer Perspectives provide a more detailed review of a selected area of research, typically through a survey of the work of the author. The author's contribution is put into the context of current and past research, and the author gives a personal perspective on the future of the field. Perspectives have no length limitation, however, they are not expected to be complete surveys of a field.

Both Focus and Perspective reviews are on invitation to the author. Proposals for reviews can be sent to the editors for consideration.

2013 in review

Content

Three thematic issues (covers shown in Fig. 1) were proposed to our readers in 2013:

Fig. 1 Covers of the January, June and November 2013 themed issues.

• the “All Aboard” January issue featured contributions from NJC's editorial board members;

• the “Hello from China” issue published in June was a follow-up to NJC's China symposia held in April 2012;

• the November issue was dedicated to Prof. Bernard Meunier on the occasion of his retirement.

The detailed content can be discovered at http://pubs.rsc.org/en/journals/journalissues/nj#!themedcollections. All of these issues were broad-based, exemplifying NJC's editorial scope.

A number of the short “Focus” and the longer “Perspective” reviews were published in 2013. Three of these reviews from the January “All Aboard” issue figure on the list of most cited papers (Table 1). The list of most cited papers published in 2012 (Table 2) also shows the interest of February's “Dendrimers II” thematic issue.

Table 1 Most cited New Journal of Chemistry articles published in 2013^a

DOI (Format)	Title	Authors	NJC, vol. 37, issue #
a As taken from Thomson Reuters Web of Science^® on November 22, 2013.
10.1039/c2nj40659d (Focus)	Outer sphere hydrogenation catalysis	Odile Eisenstein and Robert H. Crabtree	1
10.1039/c2nj40673j (Focus)	Luminescent chemosensors based on silica nanoparticles for the detection of ionic species	Marco Montalti, Enrico Rampazzo, Nelsi Zaccheroni and Luca Prodi	1
10.1039/c2nj40687j (Paper)	Lewis acidity and sugar receptor activity of 3-amino-substituted benzoxaboroles and their ortho-aminomethylphenylboronic acid analogues	Agnieszka Adamczyk-Woźniak, Krzysztof M. Borys, Izabela D. Madura, Alicja Pawełko, Ewelina Tomecka and Kamil Żukowski	1
10.1039/c2nj40560a (Perspective)	Variation of structural motifs in lanthanoid hydroxo clusters by ligand modification	Philip C. Andrews, William J. Gee, Peter C. Junk and Massimiliano Massi	1
10.1039/c3nj41052h (Paper)	Synthesis of luminescent BPh2-coordinated 2-(2′-hydroxyphenyl)benzoxazole (HBO)	Julien Massue, Pascal Retailleau, Gilles Ulrich and Raymond Ziessel	4
10.1039/c2nj40798a (Paper)	Zinc(II) complexes with the quinolone antibacterial drug flumequine: structure, DNA- and albumin-binding	Alketa Tarushi, Jakob Kljun, Iztok Turel, Anastasia A. Pantazaki, George Psomas and Dimitris P. Kessissoglou	2
10.1039/c2nj40590c (Paper)	Nickel foam based polypyrrole–Ag composite film: a new route toward stable electrodes for supercapacitors	Jiatong Wei, Guozhong Xing, Li Gao, Hui Suo, Xinping He, Chun Zhao, Sean Li and Shuangxi Xing	2
10.1039/c2nj40887b (Paper)	Preparation, crystal structures, thermal decompositions and explosive properties of two new high-nitrogen azide ethylenediamine energetic compounds	Bi-Dong Wu, Zun-Ning Zhou, Fu-Gang Li, Li Yang, Tong-Lai Zhang and Jian-Guo Zhang	3

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Table 2 Most cited New Journal of Chemistry articles published in 2012^a

DOI (Format)	Title	Authors	NJC vol. 36, issue #
a As taken from Thomson Reuters Web of Science^® on November 22, 2013.
10.1039/c1nj20658c (Paper)	One-pot hydrothermal synthesis of graphene quantum dots surface-passivated by polyethylene glycol and their photoelectric conversion under near-infrared light	Jianhua Shen, Yihua Zhu, Xiaoling Yang, Jie Zong, Jianmei Zhang and Chunzhong Li	1
10.1039/c1nj20501c (Perspective)	Dendritic effects: dependency of dendritic nano-periodic property patterns on critical nanoscale design parameters (CNDPs)	Donald A. Tomalia	2
10.1039/c1nj20458k (Perspective)	“Janus” dendrimers: syntheses and properties	Anne-Marie Caminade, Régis Laurent, Béatrice Delavaux-Nicot and Jean-Pierre Majoral	2
10.1039/c2nj40206h (Paper)	Ag3PO4–SnO2 semiconductor nanocomposites with enhanced photocatalytic activity and stability	Lili Zhang, Hengchao Zhang, Hui Huang, Yang Liu and Zhenhui Kang	8
10.1039/c2nj20873c (Perspective)	Glycodendrimers as functional antigens and antitumor vaccines	Tze Chieh Shiao and René Roy	2
10.1039/c1nj20782b (Paper)	Piezofluorochromism and morphology of a new aggregation-induced emission compound derived from tetraphenylethylene and carbazole	Xie Zhou, Haiyin Li, Zhenguo Chi, Xiqi Zhang, Jianyong Zhang, Bingjia Xu, Yi Zhang, Siwei Liu and Jiarui Xu	3
10.1039/c2nj40151g (Paper)	alpha-Fe2O3 nanoparticles anchored on graphene with 3D quasi-laminated architecture: in situ wet chemistry synthesis and enhanced electrochemical performance for lithium ion batteries	Dezhi Chen, Wei Wei, Ruining Wang, Jingchao Zhu and Lin Guo	8
10.1039/c1nj20408d (Perspective)	Dendrimers as non-viral vectors for siRNA delivery	Xiaoxuan Liu, Palma Rocchi and Ling Peng	2

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Some metrics

NJC's impact factor for 2012 jumped by 14% to reach 2.966, a very satisfying progression.

Submissions were on the rise all year, such that we expect an overall increase of 25% in submissions over the previous year. Over the past 5 years, submissions to NJC have more than doubled. As a consequence, the number of articles and pages published has also increased, and particularly in 2013, as can be seen in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2 The number of articles and pages published per year in NJC since 1995.

The Royal Society of Chemistry prides itself on fast dissemination of your research results. The final typeset and proofed publication is available on the web as an Advance Article within a few weeks. However, authors can also choose to have their “just accepted” manuscript posted on the web within a few days of acceptance in its “as accepted” form, meaning that your results can be discovered by your colleagues even more quickly.

Conference activities

NJC continued its active conference program, with sponsorship of 22 conferences in 2013. Canada was a particular focus of our efforts in 2013, gathering NJC sponsorship for 4 events, including two of the symposia at the Canadian Society for Chemistry's annual meeting.

As in past years, we continue to recognise and reward outstanding young chemists. NJC poster prizes were awarded to 12 younger scientists. NJC also provided student bursaries at the 18th European Symposium on Organic Chemistry and at the 4th Georgian Bay International Conference on Bioinorganic Chemistry.

Dr Florence Mongin (University of Rennes, France) was the NJC Young Plenary Lecturer at the 20th EuCheMS Conference on Organometallic Chemistry (http://www.eucomcxx.com/). Most recently, Dr Markus Antonietti (MPI Colloid and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany) was the NJC Plenary Lecturer at the 2nd workshop on ionic liquid materials (http://ilmat2013.icgm.fr/) held in Montpellier, France.

Coming up in 2014

2014 NJC symposia in Sweden

After France in 2011 and China in 2012, the NJC Editorial Board will travel to Sweden for the 3rd NJC Symposia Series. NJC Board member Prof. Christina Moberg will host a day-long symposium at the KTH in Stockholm on May 21st and Prof. Ola Wendt will be our host on May 23rd at Lund University. Full details and the scientific programmes will be posted on the NJC Blog (http://blogs.rsc.org/nj/) in the coming weeks.

We look forward to meeting many of our colleagues from Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, and we extend also the invitation to colleagues in the countries on the southern side of the Baltic Sea. Come join us and enjoy the Swedish spring.

Conferences

The editors are looking forward to another full year of conference presence. The list of conferences that the NJC editors will be attending will be posted in the coming weeks on the NJC blog (http://blogs.rsc.org/nj/). Please let us know if you will be attending any of the meetings where the NJC editors will be present. We always look forward to meeting our public in person rather than just electronically!

Themed issues

In spring 2014 NJC will publish a themed issue on advanced complex inorganic nanomaterials. The key topics covered by this issue include the preparation and characterisation of these materials (whether nanomaterials, porous materials, coordination networks, etc.) along with their properties (such as magnetism or spin crossover) and applications (in catalysis, energy devices, sensors, etc.). This issue is guest edited by Prof. Yann Garcia (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium) and Prof. Bao-Lian Su (University of Namur, Belgium).

Other thematic issues are in the planning stages for later in 2014 and 2015. Calls for papers and announcements of their publication will be posted on the NJC blog (once, again, that's http://blogs.rsc.org/nj/).

A new format introduced

At its annual meeting, the Editorial Board agreed to the publication of Comments and Replies. These short companion pieces allow readers to make scientific comments on a published article and the authors to reply to these comments. The peer-reviewed Comment and Reply will be published together, providing the chemistry community with a forum for debate and the sharing of different viewpoints.

Thanks and best wishes for 2014

We thank our authors for their confidence in NJC. We endeavour to offer a personalised service to our authors. Specific editorial suggestions and the targeted publicity of accepted manuscripts are just two of our actions designed to provide an extra service.

With the increase in submissions, qualified reviewers are increasingly solicited to evaluate manuscripts. We warmly thank all those who help the editors select the best work to be published in NJC.

Readers are critically important to us as well. We encourage you to sign up for the e-alerts (www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/forms/V5profile.asp) so as not to miss a single issue of NJC, to send us your comments on how we can improve the journal further, and to cite NJC articles when relevant to your work.

Others who contribute to the continuing success of NJC are the editors and board members, and we thank them for their efforts on behalf of the journal. We wish all of you the very best in 2014!

 

Looking forward by looking further—beyond the traditional boundaries—NJC presents chemistry as the central science.

 

Wais Hosseini

Editor-in-Chief

Denise Parent (CNRS; E-mail: njc@univ-montp2.fr; ) and Jamie Humphrey (Royal Society of Chemistry; njc@rsc.org)

Editors

Plate1 Denise Parent and Mir Wais Hosseini

Staying informed

Read NJC at: www.rsc.org/njc

Learn more at: http://www.njc.cnrs.fr/?lang=en

Prefer French?: http://www.njc.cnrs.fr

More news at: http://blogs.rsc.org/nj/

Submit at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/njc

Contact us at: E-mail: njc@univ-montp2.fr; ornjc@rsc.org

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