The latest edition of Nature Chemistry just arrived. As I was flicking through it on the walk back to my office, I noticed the large number of pages that are given up to references. The reference style includes the full title of the paper which is really useful if you are trying to establish whether the reference is worth hunting down, but rather costly of space. It occured to me that DOIs were a far more efficient way of referencing, and could substantially cut down on the number of trees required to print the journal. Now I appreciate that a DOI is an entirely unintuitive format to type out in a reference section and the chances of errors are much higher. At least with author names, journal titles and a few numbers one can usually track down the correct article.
Of course this issue is largely irrelevant with online editions, but there is something very nice about sitting down with a paper copy of a journal to read an article rather than spending another 15 minute staring at a computer screen.
In other news, I’d like to point you towards ChemCafe, a new chemistry blog. It takes time and effort (and supportive comments) to get a new blog up and running, particularly in the chemistry blogosphere. If you’ve got some free time, go and show Sebastien that he’s not talking to himself!
On that note (she says, rolling up her sleeves and getting onto her soap box), chemistry is a very difficult topic to blog about. We don’t get dinosaurs, flesh eating bacteria, bird flu, earthquakes, volcanoes, physiological links to behavior or any of the other headline grabbing science issues that the life and earth sciences have in their arsenals. We also don’t get astronauts heading off into space to fix our best telescope. I think this is why so many chemistry bloggers blog to a chemist only audience, talking about far more technical and specialist ideas than your average science blog. It always feels like chemists must apologize for and justify their existence by trying to explain the chemistry of every day stuff just to prove that the subject is important and relevant today. The chemical sciences are as vibrant and important today as any other science subject. It isn’t just SN2 reactions and the periodic table. It is fuel cells, medicines, advanced materials (think teflon, goretex and kevlar), environmental clean up, and so much more.
