From: Kiessling, Dr Anthony J (akiessli$##$mansfield.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2006 - 16:01:39 EDT
Ken,
I agree with others that is a pretty bold statment for post-docs to make. I had an experience in grad. school trying to reproduce a published procedure. At the time I needed a compound and the literature source I used (Perkins Tranactions if I remember right) was the only source at the time for that particular compound. Anyway, the lit. claimed a 45% yield during one particular step in the synthesis. The step for anyone who is curious was a Dieckmann cyclization that yielded a bicyclic compound. Well, I tried the step and got a 20% yield. Tried again same result. I was able to contact the person who actually did the work and found out that they did publish their best yield not their average yield which for them was 30%. I needed to push a lot of material through and had limitations on equipment so I did the reaction several times. My best yield overall almost matched the literature value. Moral of the story: 1) try to find more than one recipe from the literature if you can; 2) try the reaction a few times before you claim the procedure doesn't work; 3) If it still doesn't work contact the authors and find out who actually ran the reaction there may be a tid-bit of information about technique that is often very had to convey in the literature. As was also mentioned remember that no one tests synthetic procedures to see if they work with the one exception of Organic Syntheses where all procedures are tested by a separate lab group to verify the claims of the authors.
Enjoy!
________________________________
From: everybody-bounces$##$orglist.net on behalf of Ken Knott
Sent: Mon 6/5/2006 2:11 PM
To: everybody$##$orglist.net
Subject: ORGLIST: Bad Journals?
I have been told by many post-docs in my school that when doing literature
searches that there are many that should be regarded warily. These include
Tetrahedron, tetrahedron letters, synthesis, and others. They say that
these journals do not carefully review the submissions and will publish more
or less anything. And that the results are often irrepreducible.
What do you all think about this? Are there others you would recommend not
putting much faith in?
Thanks,
Ken
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