Macromolecular Rapid Communications
Editorial
Fast, Faster, Rapid! One of the things I like most about my job as editor of Macromolecular Rapid Communications (MRC) is the daily contact with scientists around the globe. While it is usually the nicest part to tell people about their successful publication, the larger part on my job of the correspondence involves, of course, having to inform authors about the rejection of their paper. Most authors take the bad news well, some even with a good sense of humor. Recently an author wrote back asking whether I wanted to rename the journal “Macromolecular Rapid Rejections.” While this statement made me smile at first, I know that it’s actually a serious business. Having spent a long time and a lot of work and money for
the preparation of a paper, it must come across as brutal if your paper is rejected—very often without external peer-review. Nevertheless, I consider this to be as fair as possible. Having handled thousands of manuscripts in the last few years and being a polymer chemist myself, I usually have a good feeling for the success probability of a paper. If I consider it as very unlikely that the reviewers won’t like the paper (for publication in MRC) I think the authors should have a decision quickly in order to not delay the submission of the manuscript elsewhere so that interested readers will have faster access to the results. Luckily, not only our rejections are rapid. The time for the peer review process (average time from submission to the first deci-
sion of all accepted papers) decreased to 22 days (from 25 days the year before). We were also able to reduce the post-acceptance time (from the time you upload the final version of the manuscript until the paper is published online) from 39 days in 2012 to 28 days in 2013. These improvements are achieved by a dedicated team of skilled technical editors but are also due to our new editorial system, Editorial Manager, which has enabled our workflows to be further optimized. One major advantage of this new system is the transfer option. If a paper does not make it into MRC (either for formal reasons, because it is too long or because the editor or the reviewers don’t rate the urgency of publication particularly as high)
Table 1. Papers with the highest contribution to the next ISI impact factor.
Title
Corresponding Author
Date
Citations in 2013
Total Citations
Recent Advances in the Covalent Modification of Graphene With Polymers
Horacio J. Salavagione et al. (Madrid, Spain)
Nov 2011
31
48
Structure-Property Optimizations in Donor Polymers via Electronics, Substituents, and Side Chains Toward High Efficiency Solar Cells
Wei You et al. (Chapel Hill, USA)
Jul 2012
22
24
Thomas P. Davis et al. (Sydney, Australia)
Aug 2011
21
47
Christopher Barner-Kowollik et al. (Karlsruhe, Germany)
Jun 2012
20
24
Development of Star Polymers as Unimolecular Containers for Nanomaterials
Haifeng Gao (Notre Dame, USA)
May 2012
20
23
Pd-Catalysed Direct Arylation Polymerisation for Synthesis of Low-Bandgap Conjugated Polymers and Photovoltaic Performance
Masaki Horie et al. (Hsinchu, Taiwan)
Nov 2012
19
19
A Nanocage for Nanomedicine: Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxane (POSS)
Alexander M. Seifalian et al. (London, England)
Jul 2011
19
37
Self-healing in Nanocomposite Hydrogels
Kazutoshi Haraguchi et al. (Chiba Japan)
Aug 2011
16
24
Poly(2-oxazoline)s as Polymer Therapeutics
Rainer Jordan et al. (Dresden, Germany)
Oct 2012
16
19
Polymers with Upper Critical Solution Temperature in Aqueous Solution
Seema Agarwal et al. (Marburg, Germany)
Oct 2012
15
15
RAFT Polymerization and Thiol Chemistry: A Complementary Pairing for Implementing Modern Macromolecular Design Single Chain Folding of Synthetic Polymers by Covalent and Non-Covalent Interactions: Current Status and Future Perspectives
Macromol. Rapid Commun. 2014, 35, 7−8 © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
wileyonlinelibrary.com
DOI: 10.1002/marc.201300881
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Macromolecular Rapid Communications
K. Severing
www.mcp-journal.de
it can be transferred to one of the other Macromolecular Journals. This saves reviewer capacities and time for the authors, especially if the paper has already gone through external peer-review. Around 50 authors have already accepted this offer in MRC, also because they appreciate the fact that they don’t have to start the submission process all over again. Being brutal on authors is not the part of my job I enjoy most but a strict selection of papers is essential to maintain and further improve the high scientific level of Macromolecular Rapid Communications. The development of the ISI impact factor shows that we are on the right track (Fig. 1). The impact factor shows a continuous growth over the last 8 years to 4.929—the highest value in the history of the journal. The publications which collected the most citations in 2013 (until November) and which will thus have the highest influence on the next impact factor are listed in Table 1. There is great
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variety repre5.5 sented among 5.0 them, with topics 4.5 ranging from classical polymer syn4.0 thesis to graphene 3.5 modification and 3.0 solar cells all the way to polymer 2.5 therapeutics and 2.0 nanomedicine. I 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 was also happy to see the balanced Figure 1. ISI Impact factor development of Macromolecular regional origin of Rapid Communications in recent years. these contributions, from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. I would like to thank the authors of these outstanding papers as well as our other authors from around the world for trusting us with their manuscripts, our critical reviewers and board members for their feedback, and you, our readers for your ongoing interest in our journal. Together we are looking forward to an exciting Kirsten Severing 2014! Editor
Macromol. Rapid Commun. 2014, 35, 7−8 © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
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