Rediscover C&EN

Last week was a busy one for C&EN. In addition to publishing daily news, assembling our weekly issue, and attending ACS Spring 2022, we were putting the finishing touches on the first ACS Discovery Report of 2022.

If you are already onto ACS Discovery Reports, thanks for reading. If you’re not, I urge you to check them out. The reports are single-topic, deep-dive treatments of issues and themes in the chemical sciences that we think deserve your attention right now. C&EN creates and distributes these reports on behalf of our colleagues from the Membership Division, and as an exclusive member benefit they are produced with you in mind. The reports are distributed electronically every 3 months, and you can find them all online at cenm.ag/discovery-reports.

C&EN has covered a range of topics in Discovery Reports since we took over production in 2019, including how artificial intelligence might be applied to materials discovery, the future of gene therapy, and the ways that chemistry can decarbonize the economy and stall global warming. The reports include cutting-edge research and analysis of major trends, as well as sections such as Companies to Watch, Movers and Shakers, and Recommended Reading, where we offer a selection of the best papers and patents published on the topic in the past 2–3 years.

Now that I’ve hopefully piqued your interest, please take a look at the Discovery Report we are publishing March 28. It covers the current landscape in cancer immunotherapy, a field that has seen a wealth of innovations in the past decade. Still, according to the report, cancer remains the leading cause of death globally and claimed nearly 10 million lives in 2020.

On a different note, I’d like to give the C&EN team a shout-out. I don’t do this very often, but the team has done stellar work through the pandemic, and it hasn’t been easy. C&EN’s online readership in 2020 and 2021—close to 9 million readers annually—exceeded all previous records, as well as our ideas about the size of audience we could reach. These readers visited cen.acs.org about 11 million times and generated more than 13 million page views each year. We have tripled the number of readers we were attracting 5 years ago and more than doubled our readership in 2019.

Our pandemic coverage has certainly had a lot to do with this growth, but recurring features like Global Top 50, Talented 12, and Trailblazers, and pieces like the recent ones on weight-loss drugs and cannabis products have also had tremendous impact.

Readers are voting with their eyes and recognizing the great work C&EN does. In addition, the quality of C&EN’s journalism continues to be celebrated by our peers in the publishing industry and among other societies and associations. In 2021, C&EN was again recognized with the Folio: Eddie and Ozzie Award for Overall Editorial Excellence in the association/nonprofit category. The Eddie and Ozzie Awards are more than 25 years old and honor excellence in engaging content and design across all sectors of the publishing industry. C&EN received the same accolade in 2018, which speaks to the continued leadership the team holds in this space.

A few weeks ago, C&EN was also short-listed for the 2022 Jesse H. Neal Awards in three categories: best technical/scientific content; best diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) coverage; and best climate change coverage.

The Neal Awards were established in 1955 and today are “the most prestigious editorial honors in the field of specialized journalism.” Being short-listed is an achievement in itself, but being acknowledged in these three areas is very important because technical and scientific content are our bread and butter, and DEI and climate change have been key to our editorial strategy and choices for a long time.

Winners will be announced April 26, so keep your fingers crossed for us.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.