To recognize the innovative research gaining attention across the diverse span of its topical interest areas, the Society highlights the top five most-read journal articles in each area during each quarter of the year.
The most-read Journal of The Electrochemical Society articles by topical interest area during the first quarter of 2019 (January through March) are listed below.
Highlights are based on articles published since January 1, 2017.
ALL of the articles listed below are open access.
To recognize the innovative research gaining attention across the diverse span of its topical interest areas, the Society highlights the top five most-read journal articles in each area during each quarter of the year.
The most-read ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology articles by topical interest area during the first quarter of 2019 (January through March) are listed below.
Highlights are based on articles published since January 1, 2017.
ALL of the articles listed below are open access.
The Electrochemical Society (ECS) will celebrate its third annual Free the Science Week (April 1-7, 2019) by once again taking down the paywall to its entire online collection of published research. For the duration of the week, the ECS Digital Library, which contains over 151,000 scientific articles and abstracts, will be freely accessible to everyone.
Thomas J. Schmidt is chair and professor of electrochemistry at ETH Zürich, and head of the Energy and Environment Research Division at Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, where he investigates various aspects of electrochemical energy conversion and storage. In 2010, he received the ECS Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award.
Schmidt has recently been reappointed as an associate editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and handles manuscripts submitted to the fuel cells, electrolyzers, and energy conversion topical interest area.
Peer Review Week 2018 is still going strong, and ECS is celebrating by highlighting insights on peer review from some of the most-qualified authorities on the subject—ECS journal editors.
The opinions shared below are those of technical and associate editors of ECS journals. The majority of these comments were originally published in Interface or on the ECS Redcat Blog within recent years.
Learn more about ECS journals and their editorial boards: Journal of The Electrochemical Society | ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.
Join the celebration! There’s still time to participate in the week’s events and join the global conversation about peer review by tweeting @PeerRevWeek and following #PeerReviewWeek18 and #PeerRevDiversityInclusion.
As of January 1, 2018, ECS will require all corresponding authors to have an ORCID iD in order to submit to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society or the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. ORCID iDs will be published in accepted articles and included in articles’ metadata to improve content discoverability and citation.
Contributing authors who would like their ORCID iDs displayed along with the corresponding author’s iD will need to update their profiles in ECSxPress with their ORCID iDs prior to their paper’s acceptance.
S.V. Babu courtesy of Clarkson University
ECS recently announced the reappointment of S.V. Babu, Distinguished University Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Clarkson University’s Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering, to its Editorial Advisory Committee (EAC).
The EAC expedites and facilitates evaluation and publication decisions of manuscripts submitted to ECS journals. In this role, experts like Prof. Babu, provide support to the journal editors in areas where existing technical editors and associate editors may need additional assistance. Committee members are available for a rapid review and additional opinions to supplement conflicting or imbalanced comments from other reviewers; processing assistance in the journal areas that receive a large number of annual submissions; and reviewing and expediting articles that go in the Society’s other communications media.
Babu is the past director of Clarkson’s Center for Advanced Materials Processing and an expert in the field of chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP), holding 31 patents. He has supervised 44 PhD and 38 MS students and is a co-author of more than 250 professional publications, including 198 peer-reviewed publications. He has organized and co-organized many conferences and symposiums, as well as served as keynote speaker numerous times. He has been named twice with the IBM Faculty Award (2004 and 2016), and acknowledgement of his contributions to education and research from Intel, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the World Education Congress among other external recognition.
The journal impact factors (JIFs) for 2016 have been released, and ECS is pleased to announce that the JIFs for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) have both risen by 8%.
The JIFs, published in the Journal of Citation Reports (formerly published by Thomson Reuters, now called Clarivate Analytics), are a long-established metric intended to evaluate the relevancy and importance of journals. A journal’s JIF is equivalent to the average number of times its articles were cited over the course of the prior two years.
From 2015 to 2016, the JIF of JES increased from 3.014 to 3.259, and the JIF of JSS climbed from 1.650 to 1.787. These increases mark a continuing trend of growth for both journals.
ECS believes that the key to sustainability is the ability to adapt. For over 115 years, ECS has been committed to publishing high quality, peer-reviewed research at the cutting edge of innovation.
But the demands of the research arena are always changing. As the scientific community develops new needs out in the field, so must ECS—as a leading nonprofit publisher—develop new avenues and more inclusive platforms for publication and dissemination.
To best accommodate the needs of contemporary scientific research, ECS’s journals, the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, are open to article submission types beyond that of the standard-issue research paper. As of 2017, ECS accepts journal submissions of five different types.
Whether you’re an author, an editor, or a reader of ECS publications, it’s beneficial to be familiar with the five ECS journal article types.
Venkat Subramanian is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Professor of Chemical Engineering and Clean Energy at the University of Washington. His research efforts focus on computational models to bridge next-generation energy materials to battery management systems. Subramanian has recently been named a new technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, concentrating in the electrochemical engineering Topical Interest Area.
What do you hope to accomplish in your role as technical editor?
I am humbled and honored to be a Journal of The Electrochemical Society technical editor and I hope to help improve the impact factor and reach of our journal without losing the rigor we are known for. In particular, the electrochemical engineering topical interest area serves a critical role of taking fundamental electrochemistry to industrial applications. My current aim is to promote both traditional and new industrial applications of electrochemistry across different scales.
What are some of the biggest barriers for authors and for readers in the current publishing model?
Once I had a proposal rejected in my early academic career wherein the reviewer criticized me for not being aware of a recent article. I called the program officer to convey my unfortunate situation of not having access to the specified journal at my institution. While there are interlibrary loans or other such mechanisms, they are not optimal for making progress in research. Research requires instantaneous and immediate access. If you don’t have it, you lose out to your competitors who have such access. Note that every proposal is (and should be) reviewed on its merit and not resources available at a particular institution. Open access is critical for researchers and scientists.
What is the role of the Journal Impact Factor in scientific publishing?
Whether we like it or not, perception matters. Many academic departments have become highly interdisciplinary. Impact factor plays a big role in tenure and promotion decisions and there may be only one faculty member working in the field of electrochemistry. While I personally don’t read or benefit much from journals with high impact factor*, I will strive hard to promote and improve the impact factor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the perception about ECS journals in the scientific community.
