Thursday, August 16, 2007

Retraction - Azepinoazepine or Viologen?

I believe a new post is way overdue. Since my last post I almost ended up becoming a regular writer for a chemistry magazine and I have been reading an excellent book: Organic Synthesis - Strategy and Control. In due course I'll post a review of this most excellent book. Anyway, let's get to the point. Additions and corrections to papers are quite common in organic chemistry but you don't see retractions very often. Well it appears that Yamaguchi, Tsutsui and Sato where getting a little bit too excited about their synthesis of azepinoazepines (1). However, after the paper was accepted in Angewandte Chemie someone (probably Thomas Vaid, Washington University, US) was kind enough to point out that they had in fact made some viologens (2) (See Vaid's paper on viologens here). I guess that paper didn't last long on the CV. In Yamaguchi's defence I will say that it isn't entirely trivial to sort out the 13C NMR spectra of these compounds and when you are actually trying to make something specific you have a tendency to get carried away at times. I just hope this sort of thing never happens to me. On a similar note someone I know recently had a rather controversial opinion paper accepted in a high impact journal. However, whilst making changes suggested by the referees she came to the realisation that they couldn't actually draw the conclusions they had been making in the first place......I guess that's better than having to retract it later on but it's gotta hurt. D!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey...hey... my bos is trying to buy that book too. Will cost him a bomb to ship here though... the price is about US90, right? Hurry and write the review... wanna know the content D!