At next week’s gathering of the American Chemical Society—running from Sept. 10 to 15 in Miami Beach, Fla., more than 8,000 chemists will cover chemistry topics ranging literally from A to Z. The meeting is to feature 524 technical sessions and some 3,500 papers, ranging from agrochemical regulation to zeolite synthesis. To coincide with this event, The Scientist asked the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to search its 1988 Research Front database to identify today’s hottest fields in chemistry.
The accompanying map, created by co-citation clustering of tbe 1988 journal literature and multidimensional scaling, represents 26 currently active fields within the broad realm of “organic and inorganic chemistry.” The hottest fields (color-coded on the accompanying map) turned out to be organometallic and bioorganic specialties.
The map is an aggregated view of individual research fronts, or specialty areas, each of which consists of a group of papers published in 1988, ...
