Editorial
Making impact in thermal sciences: Overview of highly cited papers published in Thermochimica Acta

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tca.2010.02.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Thermochimica Acta has been serving the thermal science community for 40 years and has now published its 500th volume. The editors provide a brief overview of the highly cited papers published by the journal. Analysis of the topics of the highly cited papers suggests that Thermochimica Acta possesses major strength in the areas of instrumentation, materials, and kinetics.

Introduction

Thermochimica Acta has been serving the thermal science community for 40 years and has now issued its 500th volume. It is an opportune time to evaluate the major strengths of our journal and the impact it has been making in the field of thermal sciences. We can do this by looking at the Thermochimica Acta papers that have been highly cited since the journal inception in 1970. The numbers of citations are readily available through Scopus®,1 an Elsevier abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature [1]. We have looked at the papers that generate largest numbers of citations in the three categories: (1) the total number of citations since publication; (2) the average number of annual citations since publication; and (3) the average number of annual citations of the papers published since 2005. The papers having more than 100 total citations or more than 10 annual citations have been conditionally viewed as making the long term impact. On the other hand, the papers having more than 5 annual citations since 2005 have been used to identify today's hot topics. A brief overview of the resulting papers suggests that they can be combined roughly in three general topics: instrumentation, materials, and kinetics.

Section snippets

Instrumentation

As stated by the first editor of Thermochimica Acta, Wendlandt, in his editorial to the first issue of the journal “The subject matter of Thermochimica Acta is primarily the applications of calorimetric and thermoanalytical techniques to research problems…” [2]. However, since the very beginning the development of new and improved calorimetric and thermoanalytical techniques has been as important a topic as their applications. The number of publications in the area of instrumentation peaked in

Materials

A large number of high impact papers published in Thermochimica Acta deals with the study of composite materials. Xie et al. [29] (107 total, 12 annual citations) studied organically modified montmorillonite nanocomposites, showing an outstanding combination of stiffness, strength and weight. Since many of these materials are used as heat and fire barriers, the combined use of thermal analysis, infrared, and mass spectrometry techniques provides useful information about the thermal stability

Kinetics

Kinetics has been a major topic of our journal since its inception. As a matter of fact, the first issue of Thermochimica Acta published in 1970 contained 13 research papers of which 3 were devoted to kinetics. Of the early kinetics papers, two publications have made a major impact. It is a 1971 paper by Sestak and Berggren [64] (270 total, 7 annual citations) and a 1976 paper by Sourour and Kamal [65] (190 total, 6 annual citations). Both papers have proposed generalized kinetic models. The

Summary and outlook

Thermochimica Acta has been a source of highly cited papers especially in the areas of instrumentation, materials and kinetics. Its ISI impact factor has been growing continuously and has recently reached 1.659. The increase in impact is largely due to the journal's emphasis on publishing papers that have a strong scholarly motivation and report results of high relevance and significance. Regrettably, not all manuscripts submitted match these criteria, and the current rejection rate is 53%.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Helen Habernickel of Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam for providing the Scopus citation data.

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