Inorganic Crystallography

Taken from C and E News, Sept 26, 2011

The journal Inorganic Chemistry published by the American Chemical Society recently celebrated its 50th year of publication. An article in Chemical and Engineering News (89 (39), 33-35, 2012) reviewing highlights from the past 50 years included extensive coverage of comments by James Ibers who was an associate editor of the journal in the 1960s. Ibers stated that the greatest impact on inorganic chemistry over the course of the journal’s history has been in chemical structure determination. He noted that the first issue in 1962 had 38 papers, none of which presented X-ray crystal structures, although a few had powder diffraction data. In the August 15 2011 issue there were 64 papers reporting 44 crystal structures, clearly illustrating the evolution of techniques and concurrent software development for single-crystal X-rays studies of inorganic molecules. Ibers himself is one of the most prolific autors in Inorganic Chemistry, with 245 papers to his credit. His first paper was published in 1964 when he was at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It centered on the crystal structure of sodium perxenate octahydrate, Na₄XeO₆.8H₂O (Inorg. Chem. 1964, 3, 1412).