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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The purpose of this newsletter is to highlight key papers in organic synthesis that have been published within the previous week.
A short selection of publications from high-impact and well read chemistry journals will be highlighted in an easy to read format, allowing subscribers to stay up-to-date with the latest literature, sent straight to your inbox at 08:00 (U.K. time) every Monday morning. 📬
If you have not received the email by this time or it has been found within your spam folder, please follow these steps with respect to your email service provider to safelist the following email address: [email protected] to make sure it goes straight into your inbox next time.
Table of Contents
What is the Organic Synthesis Newsletter?
The newsletter exists to serve two purposes:
To keep you up-to-date with the latest developments in synthetic organic chemistry.
To package this information into an easy to read 15-minute newsletter sent straight to your inbox every Monday morning.
A short selection of key publications from high-impact and well read chemistry journals are highlighted in an easy-to-read format, with their TOC graphic, a shortened form of the abstract, and a link that takes you straight to the article.
Keeping up-to-date with the literature while undertaking a PhD or post-doctoral research position in any field is a necessary but challenging process. Particularly in organic synthesis, where hundreds, if not thousands of new publications appear online daily. Sifting through all of these for relevant and useful material can be a time-consuming task, even with the use of an RSS reader. This alongside lab work, meetings, presentations and report writing oftens mean that literature searching quickly falls to the bottom of the list, despite its value.
Journal clubs are often a useful, collaborative way to keep on top of new literature—by dividing the task among colleagues before collating and sending it out to a broader audience. However, this requires the journal club to: (i) fit your topic of interest, (ii) be easily accessible, and (iii) be updated regularly.
This newsletter aims to provide a solution to the above by providing subscribers with an easy to read summary of the latest and most important publications in organic synthesis—delivered straight to your inbox, every Monday morning. 📬
This newsletter will cover the following journals; however, I will add publications from other journals that stand out as being particularly interesting to the organic synthesis community.
Where did the idea for this newsletter come from?
The idea for this newsletter originated from my time as a PhD student within the group of Prof. Varinder K. Aggarwal at the University of Bristol. The group had its own journal club, started by Dr. Adam Noble, who had prior experience with other journal clubs and brought this over to the group. This proved instantly popular and useful, so much so that many alumni have since taken this forward and started journal clubs of their own. I started one of these as a post-doctoral research associate within the group of Prof. Andrew L. Lawrence at the University of Edinburgh and wanted to continue this as I moved into industry.
This newsletters is for anyone in the synthetic organic chemistry community with an interest in the literature, whether you have just entered into a PhD programme, are an industrial professional, academic or anything in-between.
Why this format?
We all appreciate the need to keep up-to-date with the literature yet rarely find the time to do so. By having a short selection of important articles delivered to your inbox every week, it saves you the time of searching them out in the first-place.
By keeping the articles in their abstract format alongside the TOC graphic, key information is quickly gathered and the reader can decide whether or not to click the link to the paper for more information or move on to the next. Also, by using this format, publication titles, author names and even key words can be easily searched for within your email inbox or by using the search bar found on the homepage of this website.
Why did you miss out [insert publication title]?
The publications highlighted within this newsletter have been chosen to showcase the most interesting and relevant papers published by the organic synthesis community in the previous week. However, this is of course a subjective matter and what may be interesting to myself won’t be to others and vice versa. There is also the chance that I will inadvertently miss publications!
This newsletter is also not meant to replace the due diligence required of a traditional academic programme. It should only be used to enhance or improve literature searching systems that are already in-place.
How much does it cost to subscribe?
Nothing! This is a free newsletter and there are no plans for a paid subscription model in the future. All newsletters will be sent out at 08:00 (U.K. time) but will also be posted live on the website for those who prefer not to subscribe.
Why are the “open paper” links not working for me?
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