Introducing the Best practice in crystallography series

 

The first words on our journal's website are `Acta Crystallographica Section C: Structural Chemistry publishes science with structural content, in particular, important results relating to the chemical sciences'. One way we do this is by publishing articles that either explain how to do some aspect of crystallography or explain why crystallographic understanding is important to a particular field of study. Nice recent examples of papers of this type include Aragon et al. (2024), Raymond & Girolami (2023), Linden (2023) and Nascimento et al. (2024). Between them, these articles cover topics as diverse as the effective use of 3D electron diffraction to elucidate structures, recognising incorrect structures, dealing with disorder and simulating the surface structure of copper ores.

Such articles go to the heart of the journal's overriding mission which is to promote excellence in both the practice and the reporting of crystallographic studies. As such, the Section Editors have attempted to promote further articles in this style by introducing a new series of commissioned articles called `Best practice in crystallography'. It is our pleasure to announce that the first three of these articles have now been published. The papers are a guide to growing crystals for single-crystal diffraction studies (Sommer, 2024), a guide to performing photocrystallography (Hatcher et al., 2024) and a review detailing what aspects of crystal structure are of particular importance to determining electrical conductance in organic materials (Schweicher et al., 2024). The Section Editors would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors of these contributions for their work.

We are delighted to announce some imminent new articles in the series. Kenneth Shankland, Mark Spillman and Elena Kabova are going to describe how best to approach solving molecular crystal structures from powder diffraction data, Dean Johnston and Robert Hanson will write on visualizing and teaching crystallographic symmetry using Jmol, and Simon Teat and Christine Beavers will describe modern usages of dedicated single-crystal synchrotron beamlines.

The aim is to keep this series open for the foreseeable future. As such, we would like more articles. So if you would like to contribute an article of either the `How to' or `Why do' types, please contact one of the Section Editors. We'd love to hear from you; it would be sensible to check in with us before starting to write as more articles are already in the pipeline.