Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Article Titles Analysis

ATA (Article Titles Analysis) may become a new way to discover trends in science. Article titles of Tetrahedron and Tettrahedron Letters, for instance, give a nice view on how things are going on in synthetic organic chemistry. The frequency of occurence of certain words in titles reflects trends in chemistry. Words in article titles of Tetrahedron and Tet. Lett. of the last 6 years were counted.

How good was the chemistry in 2006?

The greatest thing is that the efficiency of the chemistry is increasing every year.

Efficient chemistry was done almost 300 times in 2006. It almost doubled in 6 years!

Although the efficiency is increasing rapidly, it did not make the chemistry more convenient and not easier. The versatility has been quite steady.

If I were in management I would say that a target for 2007 is to try to translate the obtained efficiancy into more convenient and easy synthesis.

What was done exactly in 2006?

As we can see the best years for metathesis are over, and Suzuki-coupling managed to recover from the 2003 Suzuki-depression and is now taking a lead.

In what medium is the chemistry done?

Apparently conventional solvents are losing terrain. The ionic-liquid mania is still going on, and aqueous and solvent-free reations are increasing rapidly as well. The green guys seem to be winning.

Conclusion: Efficient Suzuki-couplings were done in an environmental friendly manner but it did not make life easier.

2 comments:

Ψ*Ψ said...

Nice! Where'd you get the idea for this?

synthetic environment said...

I used to say: 'Metathesis-in-ionic-liquid-Letters' instead of Tet. Lett. That is probably where the idea was born.

Working my way through so many journal contents, I realized that there is something like a title idiom, with slow changes and hypes in vocabulary.

I think that such a word analysis of titles can indeed reveal certain trends in research (although you would probably reveal trends you were already aware of)). The scale on which I performed this is ofcourse crap.