Nick White

pubs.acs.orgHydrogen-Bonded Networks from Poly(dimethylamidinium) Cations and Polycarboxylate AnionsTwo ditopic and one tetratopic dialkylamidinium-containing compounds were synthesized and their ability to form hydrogen-bonded networks or frameworks with polycarboxylate anions was studied. A series...

29 Oct 2025

Also out this week, part of Meabh's Honours research project investing what happens when you add methyl substituents to amidinium groups and try to make HOFs from them. Weird stuff is what happens. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.comadvanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

29 Oct 2025

Great to see this collaborative project led by @jona-foster.bsky.social reporting the first halogen-bonded nanosheets out: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Congrats to first author Prioti and the whole team.

pubs.rsc.orgDefining, designing and determining the structure of supramolecular frameworksSupramolecular frameworks, ordered porous networks assembled by noncovalent interactions, are a broad class of functional materials with emergent combinations of properties arising from the relatively...

29 Sept 2025

Michael McGuirk and I wrote an tutorial review on supramolecular frameworks (hydrogen bonds, halogen bonds, chalcogen bonds etc) where we try to get everyone to agree on some common definitions for things. Might be a long shot! Hopefully useful for new students. pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

onlinelibrary.wiley.comLow Symmetry Cage Complexes Formed by Metalation of Symmetric Hexa‐Cationic Organic CagesThreefold symmetric hexa-cationic hydrazone cages coordinate a range of transition metal ions upon deprotonation. When the cage contains ethyl solubilising groups the expected threefold symmetric cag...

21 Aug 2025

We have a new paper out with Annie Colebatch: we metalate 6+ hydrazone cages to give M3-cage metallocages with coordinatively unsaturated metal ions. Et solubilising groups give expected 3-fold symmetric metallocages. OMe or OPr give funky low-symmetry cages tinyurl.com/4ehppaex.

13 Aug 2025

Very good thread on the silliness of impact factors.

Valentin Rodionov@arbitraryeffect.bsky.social

This is an excellent illustration of how useless the "Impact Factor" metric is. The most influential multidisciplinary chem journals are JACS and Angewandte. They did not make the list. In this short ad hoc 🧵 I will analyze in real time what made the list and why. I have a bad feeling about this.

2024 journal impact factors are out, and I had a bit of a play around comparing the numbers with 2019 IFs. Bit of a thread to follow, but general trend seems to be most journal IFs are trending downward but JACS/Angew and big “less-selective” journals buck the trend.

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).

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?

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

@lewischemistry.bsky.social

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.

Nick White reposted

Jamie Lewis

13 June 2025

We have a 3-year postdoc position available, starting in October, to work on molecular capsules for catalysis. Click on the link below to apply! 👇 Happy to have informal chats about the post - send me an email. Application deadline 6 July. edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... #chemsky

edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.comResearch Fellow - School of Chemistry - 105878 - Grade 7To create and contribute to the creation of knowledge by undertaking a specified range of activities within an established research programme and/or specific research project.

8 May 2025

Does anyone tech-savvy know if there's a browser extension or something that get journals to just show me the normal pdf rather than their annoying epdfs? Manually deleting the e from epdf in the web address and reloading is getting tedious. #chemsky

9 Apr 2025

Who among us hasn't wanted to prepare a "mental-organic framework?" #chemsky

13 Feb 2025

Bit belated (thanks COVID), but thanks to everyone who came to Supramol25 in Canberra last week. Some great plenaries and prize talks, and most impressively of the ~ 30 talks over 2 days, not a single one was in 4:3 format! I think this might be a career highlight.

23 Dec 2024

1 pm Saturday: invitation to review a revision of a manuscript I've previously reviewed 6 pm Sunday: "I recently invited you to review this manuscript and have yet to receive your response" I get that journals want things signed off before Christmas, but this seems a bit much!

onlinelibrary.wiley.comPorous Halogen‐Bonded Frameworks Assembled through Hetero‐polytopic Ion Pair TemplationA tetratopic halogen-bond donor with a discrete cation binding site was designed and synthesised. When crystallised with NaCl, a 3D framework is formed where the charge-balancing cation is sequestere...

17 Dec 2024

We report porous halogen bonded frameworks, assembled using NaCl ion pair templation. Not stable to evacuation but stable to solvent exchange and iodine vapour. Congrats to first/corresponding author Jordan who designed the system and visiting Edinburgh MChem student Callum who first made them.

17 Dec 2024

Thanks to Huan and Valeska for measuring the gas binding properties (or gas binding non-properties as it turned out).

pubs.acs.orgExpedient Decagram-Scale Synthesis of Robust Organic Cages That Bind Sulfate Strongly and Selectively in WaterSelective anion recognition remains a key challenge in supramolecular chemistry: only a very small number of systems that can function in water are known, and these nearly always preferentially bind h...

23 Sept 2024

New paper: We prepare robust organic cages in two steps and on large scales (up to 14 g). These can bind sulfate selectively in water. First paper in collaboration with Annie Colebatch and her group. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

pubs.rsc.orgHydrogen-bonded frameworks containing aliphatic 3D linkers show high-capacity water vapour sorptionHydrogen-bonded frameworks were prepared from a tetra-amidinium component and three-dimensional cubane and bicyclopentane dicarboxylate linkers. Despite the incorporation of aliphatic components, the ...

20 Dec 2023

Is it OK to post papers on Bluesky? If so, end-of-year paper collaboration with Lauren Macreadie, pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a... You can put cubane and bicyclopentane in hydrogen bonded frameworks, and they still absorb (a lot of) water vapour.