Impact and influence of crystallography across the sciences

Crystallography has influenced many of the traditional science disciplines and has opened a number of cross-disciplinary activities often bringing physicists, chemists, biologists and medical scientists together.


2013, 2012 and 2011 Chemistry awards went to Martin Karplus and Michael
Levitt 'for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems', to Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka 'for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors', and to Danny Shechtman 'for the discovery of quasicrystals', respectively. In 2010, Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov received the Physics Nobel Prize'for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene', opening a whole new field of two-dimensional materials chemistry. We congratulate the 2016 Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine (Yoshinori Ohsumi 'for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy') and Chemistry (Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa 'for the design and synthesis of molecular machines'). We are pleased to note that Ohsumi, Stoddart and Feringa have published some 40 papers in IUCr journals during the period 1986-2014.
One hundred years after the first Nobel Prize to crystallography to Laue in 1914, the IUCr celebrated the impact and influence of crystallography by launching a comprehensive, all inclusive open-access journal, IUCrJ. The journal received its first impact factor of 5.3 this year. This starting impact factor is pleasing and results from our authors having the trust and confidence to submit some of their best work to the journal. We encourage you all to consider the journal alongside other notable journals such as PNAS, JACS, Nature Communications and Nature Materials. The top ten countries contributing to the journal were the USA, the UK, Germany, France, India, Japan, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia and China/Russia/ Spain; eight of these are common with Nature, Science and PNAS. The five top contributing countries of the 30 most cited papers (with a total of 602 citations and averaging 20 cites per paper) were Germany, the USA, the UK, France, India and Switzerland.
These highly cited papers represent the full range of science, methods and instrumentation. The broad area of science covered was from halogen bonds (Mukherjee & Desiraju, 2014) and multiferroic materials (Gilioli & Ehm, 2014) to serial femtosecond crystallography Schlichting, 2015) and synchrotron radiation serial crystallography . In addition to reporting step changes in science, some of these articles reported major advances in instrumentation and approaches. The journal thus provides readers with an opportunity to see some excellent science in the chemical, materials and biological fields while keeping up with significant advances in instrumentation, methods and approaches. We aim to continue this unique combination of structural sciences in one place while welcoming new areas like the chemistry and materials science pertaining to two-dimensional crystals such as graphene (Novoselov et al., 2005).
Like the FEL community, we wish to encourage the cryo-EM community to make IUCrJ their natural home. The importance of cryo-EM for structural science has been obvious to the IUCr for many years and will be an important feature of the next IUCr Congress in Hyderabad (http:// www.iucr2017.org/), where as well as the keynote speakers of the IUCr Gjonnes Medal (Richard Henderson and Nigel Unwin), there will be an additional keynote (Sriram Subramanian) and three microsymposia each with six talks. Like the Congress, IUCrJ aims to be a leading journal for reporting important advances in cryo-EM methods as well as significant science results from the application of cryo-EM, which is proving to be the method of the decade.
We are pleased to announce that the IUCr has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, http://www.ascb.org/dora/). The Declaration calls on the world scientific community to stop using journal-based metrics, particularly journal impact factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in the assessment of individual scientists' contributions. It is clear from a citation analysis of PNAS, IUCrJ and Nature that a large proportion of papers in these journals receive much lower numbers of citations than the journal's impact factor, making use of such metrics for hiring, promotion or funding decisions irrational.