Nick White
@nickwhite.bsky.social
480 followers 180 following 42 posts
Supramolecular chemist at the Australian National University. www.nwhitegroup.com. British-born, NZ-raised, newly Australian. Boulderer and trail runner.
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nickwhite.bsky.social
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...
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...
pubs.rsc.org
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
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...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
nickwhite.bsky.social
Very good thread on the silliness of impact factors.
arbitraryeffect.bsky.social
This is an excellent illustration of how useless the "Impact Factor" metric is.

The most influential multidisciplinary chem journals are JACS and Angewandte. They did not make the list.

In this short ad hoc 🧵 I will analyze in real time what made the list and why. I have a bad feeling about this.
chemistryworld.com
Impact factors and citation metrics across analytical, organic, physical and medicinal chemistry.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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?
nickwhite.bsky.social
Or stop giving out lecture recordings to everyone? Could be given to people with a medical need, or to everyone in exam period?
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
Sadly I suspect you're right.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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?
nickwhite.bsky.social
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).
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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).
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
In both years, materials IFs >> inorganic > organic ~ phys chem.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
A graph comparing 2024 and 2019 journal impact factors.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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.
nickwhite.bsky.social
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?
Reposted by Nick White
lewischemistry.bsky.social
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
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.
edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com
nickwhite.bsky.social
Annoyingly, the Chrome extension has been disabled (doesn't follow Chrome best practice guidelines, apparently).
nickwhite.bsky.social
Awesome, will give that a shot - thanks!
nickwhite.bsky.social
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
nickwhite.bsky.social
😂😂😂 This one is in a good journal - it seems like someone from the editorial/production team should probably have caught it!