To be honest I think there's a space for both. Some unis all online, some all in-person. If we are going to do online lectures though, why does every uni need to make their own? Why not just get a few good lecturers to make videos for everyone?

Or stop giving out lecture recordings to everyone? Could be given to people with a medical need, or to everyone in exam period?

I think you overestimate the political engaged-ness of the average voter and the inherent tendency to vote for a) who they voted for last time and/or b) one of the two majors by default.

I know you acknowledged that, so consider this a pointless response to your pointless punditry prediction.

Sadly I suspect you're right.

Yeh I agree. I think speed of publication is also one of the reasons materials journals have such IFs - it's quicker to turn work around than say a natural product synthesis or a protein evolution study.

Is this because they’re publishing more of the better papers? Or just focusing on highly cited areas? Or that people are getting lazy with their citing and just concentrating on JACS/Angew? Possibly all of the above?

So what does this all mean? Probably not much. The very top journals are cannibalising the next tier down as well as the subdiscipline-specific journals (JOC, Inorg. Chem. etc).

They’re cut off from my graph, but Nat. Chem. (22 --> 20) and Chem (20 --> 20) have stayed broadly similar. Nature (43 --> 49), Science (42 --> 46) have increased slightly.

Pleasingly this year, there are lots of papers that have been cited a few times, which seems more sustainable! (Each paper only contributes to IFs for the year it is published and the following year).

On a personal note, Supramol. Chem. has increased from 1.3 --> 2.6 in this time. This probably says something about the vagaries of IFs though: a couple of years ago, it was even higher (3.3), in that case largely based on one very highly-cited paper.

In both years, materials IFs >> inorganic > organic ~ phys chem.

My suspicion is that this is because these journals are publishing a lot of highly/rapidly citing materials chemistry, but I don’t really know. It could be the effects of being open access too, or that there is a lot of useful stuff in these journals.

The other journals that have improved a lot are RSC Adv., ACS Omega and Molecules. This means that the ACS and RSC “less-selective” journals now have higher IFs than e.g. JOC, Dalton, OBC. This isn’t just that they’re publishing more reviews.

JACS, Angew and Nat. Comm. are notable improvers, while what I would consider the next tier down from JACS/Angew (Chem. Sci., Chem. Comm. CEJ) have decreased quite a lot. That means the gap between JACS/Angew and the rest is pretty huge.

IFs are clearly silly and game-able, and I don’t think they have that much of a correlation with “quality,” but it’s interesting (to me) to see how they’re changing over time. This chart compares 2019 and 2024 IFs: things above the black line have increased, below have decreased.

Yeh it's weird here - everyone is nice but no one really engages much.

Although the next post in my timeline is a thread with loads of people debating how to capitalise UV-Vis...so maybe there's still hope?

Annoyingly, the Chrome extension has been disabled (doesn't follow Chrome best practice guidelines, apparently).

Awesome, will give that a shot - thanks!