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Reinterpreting data

I recently had a paper rejected by the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) on the grounds that the policy of the journal is to no longer accept papers based on interpretation or reinterpretation of existing data. The work in question was based on data from the CSD and otherwise got a favorable review. Therefore I wrote the letter reprinted below. Due to C&E News policy of publishing only letters related to stories that appear in C&E News itself, my letter will not be published. I thought the readers of the IUCr Newsletter should be alerted to this policy.

Letter to the Editor C&E News:

Many of your readers, potential authors of papers submitted to the Journal of the American Chemical Society, will be interested to know that it is now JACS policy not to publish papers that primarily take existing published literature data and use it without significant new data, experimental or theoretical contributions. This ruling applies not only to results based on so-called quantitative structure-activity relations (QSAR), chemometric treatment of data sets, etc., but also to those based on systematic studies of published crystal structures collected from databases such as the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) or the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank (PDB). A recent referee's report from a member of the JACS editorial board states that "JACS should not be the venue for (re)interpretation of existing data."

This means that papers dealing with the systematics of intermolecular interactions as expressed in crystal packing patterns are to be excluded. Of the thousands of crystal structures that are determined annually, only a tiny fraction receive any discussion whatsoever in the published literature, and in these it is usually the molecule itself that is the center of discussion; the packing is hardly ever mentioned. Besides, what can be learned from a study of the packing in one crystal structure? One has to look at many to identify the recurring patterns, the exceptions from these, and the reasons for these exceptions.

In the past, the (re)interpretation of existing data has played a vital role in the development of chemistry. Are we now to limit what is important only to the latest (truly novel) experimental results? One should keep in mind that according to the new ruling, many of Pauling's important papers might not have qualified for JACS. Mendeleev's paper on the periodic system would almost certainly have been rejected.

Jack Dunitz