WIREs Comput Mol Sci

Once in a while a new journal appears which have a fair opportunity of evolving into a high-impact journal come sufficient time. The Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (JCTC) of William Jorgensen (Yale University) and Gustavo Scuseria (Rice University) is becomming one of these types of journals as of 2011/2012 and now a new journal has entered the field, namely the WILEY Interdisciplinary Reviews - Computational Molecular Science (WIREs Comput Mol Sci). The journal has as editor in chief the renowned Peter R. Schreiner (Justus-Liebig University Giessen) and what is indeed interesting about this journal - or review journal to be more precise - is the agenda. Not necessarily the scientific agenda, although intriguing to a student in the field of theoretical chemistry as myself, but rather the actual journal agenda, i.e. the actual reason as to why the journal was born.

Professor Schreiner describes this himself in the Editorial Commentary of Issue 1 (2011):

The maturing of the field of computational chemistry, in a broader context, perhaps better referred to as computational molecular sciences, required the development of an appropriate publication platform that takes into account the large variety of research approaches as well as style of presentation, and the many visual as well as dynamic aspects that a print-only review journal simply cannot offer.

Furthermore, with respect to the scientific context in which it has emerged as well as to the accessibility of the content , Professor Schreiner explains:

WIREs—CMS will provide a platform for highquality review-type information that is broadly accessible to a diverse audience of scientists and engineers. It will capture the crucial interdisciplinary flavor of this field by requiring authors to address the key topics from the differing perspectives of chemistry, biology, materials science, and computational modeling.

Publications in the journal are divided into different categories; Overviews, Advanced Reviews, Focus Articles, and finally Software Articles. This is a journal partitioning which I personally find uttermost attractive as it is a somewhat natural publication scheme for a review journal.

I end by recommending a few, selected articles, but leave it to the reader of the present post to explore WIREs Comput Mol Sci in further detail. Due to the journal still being in its infant phase, there is a free access to the library content for the rest of the year 2011.

Selected titles:

• Excited state coupled cluster methods by Sneskov, K. and Christiansen, O. (DOI: 10.1002/wcms.99)
• Coupled-cluster theory and its equations-of-motion extensions by Bartlett, R. (DOI: 10.1002/wcms.76)
• Møller-Plesset perturbation theory: from small molecule methods to methods for thousands of atoms by Cremer, D. (DOI: 10.1002/wcms.58)
• Psi4: an open-source ab-inito electronic structure program (Software Focus) by numerous authors (DOI: 10.1002/wcms.93)