Science Watch - November/December 2004

U. Michigan�s Omar Yaghi on What's In Store for MOFs
Some phrases just ring with a futuristic tone, despite our inescapable presence already in the 21st century. One of them is "crystal engineering." It suggests, for example, high-tech diamond merchants mindful of a plan that goes beyond digging for their wares. In truth, crystal engineering is a technology that�s already arrived, with a host of applications from fuel cells on a chip to nanosensors and molecular electronics. Crystal engineers design their micro-modular materials out of molecular building blocks from the bottom up, but they conceive the properties in advance with the heady perspective of top-down design logic.
      Among the more remarkable of these crystalline materials to be synthesized in the last decade are called "metal-organic frameworks," or MOFs for short, products of the mind and the laboratory of University of Michigan chemist Omar M. Yaghi. Yaghi�s pioneering work in the creation of microporous crystalline and solid-state materials has placed him among the 50 most-cited scientists in chemistry in the last decade, according to Thomson Scientific�s Essential Science Indicators. Since 1994 Yaghi has racked up over 20 papers with more than 100 citations each, and his seminal 1998 review article "Synthetic strategies, structure patterns, and emerging properties in the chemistry of modular porous solids," published in Accounts of Chemical Research, has itself tallied more than 600 citations (see table below, paper #1). Yaghi�s papers on MOFs have regularly figured in the Chemistry Top Ten in recent years�discussed, for example, in the issues for May-June 2001 and January-February 2004...

Sketches of Spain Show Gain Over the last two decades, Spain has substantially increased its presence in world science, according to a new Science Watch survey. The graph below, based on figures from the Thomson Scientific National Science Indicators database, shows Spain�s percent share of Thomson-indexed scientific papers between 1981 and 2003. As the graph indicates, papers with at least one author address in Spain accounted for less than 1% of the Thomson database in 1981�some 3,400 papers. By 2003, Spain�s share had grown to exceed 3% of the database, with roughly 24,800 papers. In output, this represents an increase of more than 600% during the 23-year period...