CINTACS Newsletter of the Cincinnati Section of the  American Chemical Society  Vol. 39, No. 8 - May 2002

CINTACS is published nine times a year (September through May) by theCincinnati Section of the American Chemical Society. All changes of addressshould be sent to Emel Yakali at Raymond Walters College, 9555 PlainfieldRoad, Cincinnati, OH 45236, phone 745-5686, FAX 745-5767, or email mc.acs@uc.edu.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

The submission deadline will be approximately August 1, for the September 2002 issue.  Electronic submission is strongly preferred,except for original photos. All materials should be sent to:

Dr. Bruce Ault
Department of Chemistry
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221
Phone: 513-556-9238
FAX: 513-556-9239
E-mail: bruce.ault@uc.edu

It’s Party Night!  Be sure to reserve Wednesday, May 15 for a gala celebration at Vinoklet Winery in Colerain Township, a couple miles north of Northgate Shopping Center!  We will start off with wine tasting (soft drinks for those who don’t care to imbibe), guided tours of the winery and vineyard, an “on the spot” selection of good food, and a discussion of wine making by our hosts at the winery.

Thanks to Cognis Corporation for sponsoring this event.  Be sure to thank the representative from Cognis for their generosity.
This is the final event of the year. Thanks to all members, executive committee chairs, officers, and supporters for making this year a “winner”.  The section is YOUR section, and YOU deserve the credit for making it thrive.
See you at the meeting!
 

Hank Greeb, Chair
Phone 513-385-8363
FAX   513-385-8888
e-mail: acschair@greeb.net

As the incoming Chair, let me begin by thanking Hank Greeb for the very nice job he has done this year.  As many of you know, I have been on sabbatical leave since last summer, so Hank has done everything without any help from his Vice-Chair.

 Shortly, I will be contacting many of you and asking for your help with the large number of committee positions that we have.  In some cases, I will ask the present committee chair to continue, and in some cases, I will ask someone else to take over.  My primary goal is to get as many different people involved in the Section as is possible.  As a start, I have asked Bruce Ault, and fortunately he has said yes, to continue the excellent work he has done as the Editor of Cintacs.

 To help you plan, on page 7 is the schedule of next year’s meetings.  We have a very diverse group of speakers.  However, we are still missing a few places to hold meetings.  If you know of an available site, or if your school or company would be willing to host a meeting, please contact me as soon as possible.

 Thanks to all, in advance, for attending these meeting and helping with Cincinnati Section of the ACS.

Allan Pinhas, Chair-Elect
phone 513-556-9255
FAX: 513-556-9239
allan.pinhas@uc.edu

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6:30 p.m.	Wine tasting, Tours of Winery and Vineyards  (carafe of wine included, mixed drinks and beer optional at cash bar)
7:30 p.m.	Dinner - Choice of entrée (steak, boneless, skinless breast of chicken, tuna, or icelandic cod),  Vegetarian Lasagne by prior arrangement.  Chicken pasta salad, Tossed Salad, Chef’s choice  of potato and vegetable, bread or rolls, assorted desserts, coffee & tea.  $20/person, Retirees, Students, K-12 teachers 1/2 price.
8:30 p.m.	Presentation of the Outstanding Service Award.

Reservations: Send your reservations to Robbin Rolfes <rolfes.rl@pg.com>, or if you have difficulty remembering this address, send to <cinacs@greeb.net>. If absolutely impossible to make reservations via the Internet, telephone 513-385-8363. Deadline for reservations is noon Wednesday May 8, 2002. NOTE the earlier than usual deadline - we really need to know the number of attendees!  (It will save a lot of trouble if you use e-mail, but we don't want to discourage those who like the "olde fashioned" means of making reservations). Tell us if you wish a vegetarian meal (other choices made upon arrival), your name, affiliation, and state if you're in one of the 1/2-price categories.  As a reminder, if you decide you must miss a meeting after you have made reservations, please e-mail or call to cancel. If you do not cancel, the Section will have to charge you because it will have been charged by the restaurant.

Directions: Take I-275 to the Colerain Avenue exit.  Go north past Lowe’s to Struble Road/Colerain Avenue.  Veer left at traffic light onto “old Colerain.”  (If you get to a point where US-27 is a divided highway, you’ve gone to far).  Vinoklet is about 1 mile farther on the left.  If in doubt, call 513-385-9309 for specific directions, or see:

                 http://www.vinokletwines.com/

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Before this school year ends it is time to plan next year’s four meetings of the chemical educators’ discussion group. Linda Ford needs two things from the area teachers: meeting sites/ hosts and program ideas. Here are some programming ideas to stimulate some thinking.

(1) Demo Derby in early October that focuses on holiday ideas such as Halloween
(2) AP Chemistry Night: Favorite labs, demos, teaching strategies
(3) Make and Take Night that includes piezo crystal launcher and/or conductivity apparatus
(4) Small scale lab experiment share session
(5)  Building a Chemistry Library (sharing favorite titles)
Classroom Projects

To express a “YES! I’d love to host” and/or a “Here’s a wonderful program idea!” e-mail Linda at lkford@fuse.net. Your input will make the group more viable.

Everyone knows why authors of scientific paper include citations to earlier publications.  Authors cite papers that teach the experimental methods they employed in the work they're reporting.  They cite papers that describe work they're expanding on, confirming, or disputing,  They cite papers that teach the basics of their research area.  They cite papers that provided the data or conclusions the current paper is quoting.  They cite their own earlier reports on the progress of their research projects.  Readers know that the cited references will provide them with background information and additional information about the research reported in the article.

Once cited, references can be used for purposes the authors never contemplated.  The science of bibliometrics is built on the idea that cited references can be analyzed to derive information about science, scientists, and publishers.  The underlying principle is that scholarly research builds on earlier work reported in the literature.  Research that is cited frequently is assumed to be more important or influential than research that is not cited in many later papers.  Authors whose publications are frequently cited must be doing more important work than those whose publications are cited less often.  Clusters of papers cited together must cover closely related research.  Journals that publish frequently cited papers must have a greater effect on the research community than journals whose articles are seldom cited.    The influence of a scientist could be evaluated by counting the citing references, and university tenure committees could use citations to estimate the scientific reputations of faculty members.  The stature of a research institution could be estimated by comparing the number of citations to papers by its staff with citations to papers published by other institutions.  All that is needed is an enormous database of cited references and a computer program designed to do statistical analyses of them.
 

Ideas about the value of citation analysis were promulgated by Eugene Garfield, who founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to build the database and design the software.  Garfield's core publication, Science Citation Index, indexes references cited in the scientific literature since 1945.  The original printed product was quickly followed by Social Science Citation Index and later by indexes for most other areas of scholarly research.  When online searching became available, the online versions, SciSearch and Social SciSearch, were among the earliest commercial databases. Abstract text was added in 1991 so that the databases could be treated as substitutes for other bibliographic databases.  The databases, now owned by Thomson Corporation, are also distributed through the Internet as the Web of Science, which recently became part of a more comprehensive service called The Web of Knowledge. The web-based version of Science Citation Index currently indexes 5700 journals in 164 disciplines.

In the era of the World Wide Web, indexing of cited references can be linked to electronic journals so that researchers can quickly obtain copies of the cited publications.  This is probably the reason that Chemical Abstracts Service has begun indexing cited references in the electronic versions of Chemical Abstracts. Hyperlinks to cited references are also appearing in patent databases.

Beyond the capture of bibliographic and citation information, ISI calculates the relationships among scientists and the relative impact of the journals they publish in. An interesting feature of SciSearch is the inclusion of Research Fronts, defined by performing co-citation analyses to identify narrow research fields related by their authors' citation of the same references.  Journal Impact Factors are calculated by counting the number of references to articles in a particular journal and comparing the number of citations with the number of citable articles published in the journal during the same time period.  An entire ISI publication, Journal Citation Reports, is devoted to reporting the impact factors of the journals indexed by ISI.  A newer way to obtain information about citations is to generate them yourself using ISI Essential Science Indicators, described as an "in-depth analytical tool [that] offers data for ranking authors, institutions, nations, and journals".

There is no doubt that reading cited references is valuable, but the use of citation counts and impact factors to make business decisions is very controversial.  Libraries use impact factors to plan their collections; low impact factors can cause  subscriptions to a journal and the publisher's revenues to drop profoundly.  They can also slow the submission of papers to the journal – nobody wants to publish in a journal with an inferior impact on research.  Individual scientists can be denied tenure if their citation counts are substandard. Low citation counts for a research group can result in lowered grant funding.  Questions have been raised about the quality and limitations of the raw data and the meaning of the conclusions drawn from them (1,2).  Are the citable articles in a journal being counted properly?  Do the counts include all authors of papers and all of the institutions to which which the authors are affiliated?  Are different forms of an author's name and different units of an institution being combined (for example, would the University of Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine be counted as one institution or two)?  Are translated and transliterated forms of a non-English journal name being recognized as a single publication?  Are granting institutions and tenure committees taking into account the differences in the numbers of references customarily cited in different disciplines?  Like any statistics derived from small sets of data, bibliometric statistics need to be used with caution.

References:
1. David Adams. "The counting house."  Nature 415, 726-9 (Feb. 14, 2002).

2. Correspondence.  Nature 415, 731-2  (Feb. 14, 2002).

Footnote:  This year, the Chemical Information Discussion Group is offering hints and updates on chemical information resources available to most chemists and techniques for using them.  Contributions from any ACS member are welcome, and so are requests for information you'd like to see in a future column.  If you have any comments, suggestions, or contributions, please email them to simmons.es@pg.com

If anyone in the local section would like to volunteer to be a part of National Chemistry Week, please contact Gloria Story (story.gm@pg.com).  Demonstration volunteers and/or planning committee members are welcome!  It's fun and rewarding - ask around.  Thanks!

Gloria Story, NCW chair

The 2002 Ralph and Helen Oesper Award Banquet and Symposium will be held on Oct. 25 and 26, 2002.  This year’s honoree will be Professor Royce W. Murray, Kenan Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Oesper Banquet will be held on Friday, October 25, with featured After-Dinner Speaker Professor Richard N. Zare, Stanford University.

 The Oesper Symposium in honor of Professor Murray will be held on Saturday, October 26.  Speakers include Prof. Robert Corn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Prof. Norman Dovichi, University of Washington, Prof. Catherine Fenselau, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Prof. Raoul Kopelman, University of Michigan and Prof. R. Mark Wightman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Professor Murray will give his award address, “Monolayer Protected Metal Nanoparticles are Interesting Molecules” at the conclusion of the Symposium.

For further information please contact Kim Carey (513-556-0293; Kim.Carey@uc.edu) or visit our website at: www.che.uc.edu.

The Overcoming Challenges Award acknowledges the efforts of women undergraduates who have overcome economic, personal and/or academic hardships in pursuit of an education in the chemical sciences.  In year 2000, The Women Chemists Committee (WCC) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) established the Overcoming Challenges Award in alignment with the committee's goals 1) to promote and recognize accomplishments of women scientists and 2) to increase participation of women in chemical related disciplines.  The award currently consists of a plaque, a $250 honorarium, and up to $1,000 travel expenses to the Fall ACS National Meeting.  While at the Fall ACS meeting, award recipients are recognized and presented the award at the WCC Luncheon held on Tuesday afternoon.

 Award candidates must be women matriculating as an undergraduate chemical science major/minor in a two-year program or at a 4-year school not granting a doctoral degree in chemical related disciplines. The WCC Recognizing and Promotion subcommittee administers the Overcoming Challenges Award with nominations due by May 1, 2002.  Nominations require a letter of request with description of challenges faced by the nominee, one letter of recommendation, and current school transcripts.  Award candidates must demonstrate triumph over hardships while pursuing their education and will be evaluated for improvement, initiative, successes, and grades from the most recent 2 semesters.

Nominations for the WCC Overcoming Challenges Award should be sent to the Women Chemists Committee, American Chemical Society, 1155 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036.  For additional information, contact the WCC at wcc@acs.org. or visit http://membership.acs.org/W/WCC.

You are encouraged to apply and/or nominate deserving women for the
WCC Overcoming Challenges Award.

From the Membership Chairman

Everyone gets those ACS renewal notices in the mail, signs their name, and sends in the check.  The rest of the material that the National ACS sends is often overlooked or placed in the “circular file.”  STOP…. Don’t do it yet.

In your recent or upcoming renewal notices, there is a short form to update your membership information.  This form is very valuable to local section membership committees, as it is the only legal way we can obtain vital contact information from our members.  There are a significant number of Cincinnati local section members that do not have updated phone numbers, addresses, and e-mail addresses.  The e-mail address is extremely valuable to local sections, because it allows easy mass communication with members on upcoming events.   This information is held in confidence and is not given out for commercial purposes.

So… if you have not done it yet, please update your contact information using the form the National ACS has distributed with the renewal statements.  If you have misplaced the form, contact the Member and Subscriber Services Office of the National ACS (800-333-9511).
 

chemistry.org Offers Weekly e-mail Newsletter

 One of the best ways to keep your finger on the pulse of ACS is by visiting chemistry.org, the Website of the American Chemical Society. But busy professionals don't always have the time to keep up with all the new content that’s being published on chemistry.org each day. That’s why the ACS developed a weekly newsletter to bring the latest and greatest content direct to your e-mail address.

Each week, subscribers receive:

· Quick summaries of our feature stories complete with color pictures and live links to full articles;
· A short description of what’s new on chemistry.org;
· Links to free articles from Chemical & Engineering News, Modern Drug Discovery, and Today’s Chemist at Work;
· Links to the latest offerings from CAS.

 The chemistry.org newsletter gives you an efficient summary of the information you want from ACS and lets you decide what to pursue.

 Subscribing (and unsubscribing) is free and easy. Just visit chemistry.org and register. Check the “Mailing List” option on the registration form and you’ll begin receiving the newsletter the following Monday. If you’ve already registered on chemistry.org, you can subscribe to the newsletter by editing your profile and checking the “Mailing List” option.
 

Salary Information Available

 The popular, new ACS Salary Comparator is posted on the ACS Department of Career Services website http://center.acs.org/applications/acscomparator/page01.cfm and is available for ACS members only. It can provide answers to your salary-related questions by providing current information applicable to specific employment situations.

 This new tool reports the complete range of full-time base salaries being paid to ACS members in a variety of jobs. The comparator gives attention to many specific factors that influence pay, including experience, level of education, professional  specialties, job functions, types of employers, and geographic location. Both academic and non-academic positions are covered.

 The second edition of the comparator has been completely updated with new data from ACS employment surveys conducted in 2001. It is presented by the Committee on Economic and Professional Affairs and DCS.

 How does the comparator work?  It uses member data from ACS’s annual employment surveys of its working members in the U.S.  You will need to define an employment situation. The system will then generate the median (50th percentile) base salary for such positions, plus a series of additional percentiles (from 10th to 90th) that show the ranges of pay for these jobs. Salary figures will be automatically updated bi-monthly to allow for inflation since the last ACS salary survey was conducted.

 You can even test potential effects of such things as getting an advanced degree or changes in your duties.

 The comparator can be run repeatedly to see how career changes influence the pay of chemists. For example, you can compare base salaries for people in R&D who are doing basic research with those for people who have become R&D managers.
 

Educators: Chemunity News Now Available!

The Winter 2001/2002 online edition of Chemunity News, the ACS newsletter that connects chemistry educators to the activities of the ACS Education and International Activities Division, is now available. As with the former paper version of this newsletter, staff hopes to provide chemists interested in education programs with timely news about the programs and services at ACS and occasionally include some thought-provoking insights and commentaries on national issues in chemistry education. The goal is to publish a  new issue every two months. If you would like to receive an email reminder when new issues are available, please email education@acs.org with your contact information.
 

Free Links to Journal Articles in C&EN

Chemical & Engineering News Online (http://pubs.acs.org/cen) offers free links to journal articles in a growing number of publications. Links to journal references in C&EN articles include not only ACS journals, but also journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (such as Chemical Communications) and Angewandte published by Wiley-VCH.   Readers do not need to be subscribers to these journals to read the linked journal articles. Please contact:  Melody Voith, Online Editor, Chemical & Engineering News, 1155 16th St., NW, Washington, DC 20036 http://pubs.acs.org/cen  phone:  202-872-4406; fax 202-872-8727 if you have any questions
 

New Member Benefit

 The American Chemical Society announces its newest member benefit.  Discounts are now available on your next stay at any of the following hotels: Ameri-Host, Days Inn, Knights Inn, Ramada Inn, Travelodge, Villager and Wingate Hotels. Take a minute and call 1-877-670-7088 to make your reservation, or call the hotel directly, mention the Society’s discount #62871 and receive up to 20 percent off your next visit at any of the above hotels.
 

Formatted and uploaded April 17, 2002, by acs@www.che.uc.edu