From Revolution to Evolution

This issue of Small heralds the start of a new year, and the first installment of our third volume. 2007 will without doubt be an important year; two years have passed since Chad Mirkin, in his Editorial Essay in our very first issue, spoke of “the beginning of a Small revolution”. Now, two years on, the time has come for Small to evolve and grow to meet the challenges that were set from the beginning, namely, to become the ideal forum for interdisciplinary science and technology on the micro- and nanoscale. Hopefully, you will discover in this Editorial that we are making progress towards this goal, and that the “Small evolution” is now in progress. 2007 is also a landmark occasion for our parent company John Wiley & Sons, marking as it does the 200th anniversary of the year in which Charles Wiley opened his first printing shop in Manhattan, specializing initially in the publication of law books, then moving on to literary works, and over the succeeding years evolving to become a leading publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature worldwide (for more information, please see the accompanying timeline charting the history of John Wiley & Sons). Wiley-VCH, which came into being when John Wiley & Sons acquired Verlag Chemie (itself boasting a history back to 1921) in 1996, is now an important arm of the corporation, and as one of its newer journals, Small is in the fortunate position of being able to build on this tradition through publishing excellent science and technology that will make significant contributions in many fields in the future. In 2007, Small will be looking to continue the great progress that has been made during the first two years of publication. 2006 saw significant increases, compared with the previous year, in both the number of manuscripts submitted to (see Figure 1 a) 1and published in the journal (218 articles, compared with 177 in our first volume; news stories, editorials, and book reviews are not included), leading to a 21 % increase in the number of pages published in our second volume. In 2007, we fully expect to maintain, and even increase, this rate of growth. As more and more people discover that Small is already an essential resource for disseminating top-quality interdisciplinary research, so the degree to which our articles are accessed via Wiley Interscience continues to grow. Figure 1 b 1provides a relative comparison of the number of articles downloaded from our website in the previous two years.1 Small continues to grow: Comparisons of a) the number of manuscripts submitted to the journal, and b) the number of articles downloaded from the Small website (data for 2006 was only available up to October at the time of writing). We have continued to enjoy the support of authors from around the world; Figure 2 2provides a regional breakdown of the papers published in the 2006 issues. The wide distribution shown in this chart is indicative of the global interest and increasing financial support that reinforces the advance in studies over all disciplines at the micro- and nanoscale. A brief scan through last year’s pages from our News from the Micro–Nano World section only serves to highlight this further, with reports of new research centers devoted to nanoscale studies opening their doors in Canada, China, Germany, Norway, Singapore, and the United States; this, of course, scratches only the surface of this, literally, global expansion. An international flavor: A chart showing the regions from which articles published in Small in 2006 originated. The similar number of articles coming from Europe, Asia, and North America (32, 28, and 36 % of the whole, respectively) clearly typifies the current worldwide interest in science and technology on the micro- and nanoscale. One can clearly discern the regard in which articles published in Small are held by the community simply by witnessing the frequency by which they are being cited by other authors. The ISI Journal Citation Reports included Small for the first time last year when announcing their 2005 Immediacy Indexes. Small, which is included in five of the ISIs journal categories, received the tremendous rating of 1.255 after only one full year of publication; to put this result into context, such a rating ranked the journal at #2 in the “Nanoscience and Nanotechnology” category and, perhaps more astoundingly, within the top 4 % of all the journals (over 6000) listed by the ISI. While these facts certainly make for interesting reading, we understand that further interest will be aroused later this year from the announcement of Small’s first Impact Factor. We are confident that this figure will be more than competitive with many other journals at a similar stage of their development (and, indeed, at their current levels), and will provide further proof that articles published in Small are being disseminated widely and cited frequently. In addition to the excellent listing of articles published in this journal on the ISI Web of Knowledge pages, we were excited to learn recently that articles published in Small will now also be listed by PubMed, the indexing service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (USA). We are delighted to see Small now listed by this service, not least as we hope that this will encourage more people working in the biological and medical sciences to add to the excellent literature that has already been published in our previous issues; for good examples, one needs only to refer back to our last issue of 2006 to discover articles discussing the utility of carbon nanotube-based microcatheters (Endo and co-workers; pp. 1406–1411) and the cellular cytotoxicity of quantum dots (Drezek, Colvin, and co-workers; pp. 1412–1417). Indeed, the articles in this issue by Besenbacher, Kjems, and co-workers (drug delivery), Bates and co-workers (enzyme-activated ligation of DNA-modified nanoparticles), and by Lenhert, Mirkin, and co-workers (dip-pen nanolithography of biomaterials, as highlighted on the front cover of this issue), amongst others, should be not only of great interest to readers working in these areas of research in particular, but also importantly to all readers of the journal. The coming of a new year has also led us to update and improve the services available to our subscribers via the Small website. You can now learn about which papers are particularly “hot” by clicking on our Most Accessed and Most Cited links. In addition to our regular Early View service, you can now also discover the subjects of papers before they are even published online by visiting the Accepted Articles page. Another innovation is the Tagcloud (currently available via our News link), which allows you to click on one of an array of the most commonly used keywords to yield lists of relevant articles. You may also have noticed an orange symbol on our webpage (see Figure 3). 3This icon is the link to our RSS feed, which provides information alerts on the titles, authors, and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) of all of our Early View articles. Click on this icon or visit the Wiley Interscience website (http://interscience.wiley.com/rss) for more information. The RSS symbol – your link for obtaining advanced information about what’s new in Small. With all of this improved information and greater choice of articles available, it is clear that subscription to Small is essential for individual academics, research groups, and libraries alike, in order to keep abreast of some of the most important research being carried out at reduced length scales. 2007 will indeed be an important year for Small, as we endeavor to succeed with the challenges that were highlighted above. On behalf of all of the editorial team, the Editorial Advisory Board, and everybody who combines to produce this and every issue of the journal, may I thank you in advance for your contributions, whether they be as author, reviewer, or subscriber. It is, after all, only with your essential support that Small can continue to grow. Graeme A. Horley1 Editor PS: The start of a new year also brings another Cover Picture Competition. Please select and vote for your favorite cover image from the 2006 issues of Small by clicking on the link that can be found on our website (www.small-journal.com). The winners will be able to choose from a range of excellent Wiley-VCH books dedicated to areas of research covered in this journal. Good luck!

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.