Ionic Liquids (ILs), formerly known as molten salts, constitute one
of the hottest areas in chemistry these days. Composed entirely of
ions, these room-temperature liquids—with a melting temperature of
below 100 degrees C—are fluid, easy to handle, and often colorless.
Much of the interest in ILs is based on their promise as
"green" substitutes for traditional industrial solvents, in
particular volatile organic compounds or VOCs, a major source of
industrial pollutants. ILs have no measurable vapor pressure and so
greatly reduce the risk associated with traditional solvents.
The hot paper lists for ILs, over the past decade and the past two
years, are dominated by reviews covering the application of
room-temperature ILs as solvents for synthesis and catalysis, their
use in electrochemical devices, their future applications in green
chemistry, and even their history. Other hot papers discuss the
solvent properties of ILs, the behavior of enzyme-catalyzed processes
in ILs, and the combination of ILs with supercritical carbon dioxide.
The hottest papers of the last two years have also come to include
those describing aryl halide coupling reactions in ILs, their use in
catalyst recycling, and the behavioral and electrochemical properties
of novel ILs
.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title- and author-supplied keywords for
Ionic Liquids. The keywords used were as follows:
ionic liquid*
The baseline time span for this database
is 1994-2004 (first bimonthly). The resulting database contained 2,165 (10 years)
and 1,288 (2 years) papers; 3,342 authors; 57 countries; 290 journals; and
745 institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers (two- and ten-year
periods), authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1994-2004 (first
bimonthly).
The top 20 papers are ranked
according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution,
and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total
papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds used to determine
scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to
total cites/paper were as follows: 15, 18, 7, and 14, respectively. These
thresholds correspond to the top 1% of authors, 10% of institutions, 50% of countries and
10% of journals by total papers.
