Biochemical Journal

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History

The journal was established in 1906 [1] by Benjamin Moore, holder of the first UK chair of biochemistry at the University of Liverpool, with financial support from Edward Whitley, an heir of the Greenall Whitley brewers. [2] The two served as the first editors and the journal was initially published by the Liverpool University Press. [3] It was acquired by the Biochemical Club (later renamed the Biochemical Society) in October 1912, shortly after the society's foundation; at that time the journal had 170 subscribers. [2] From 1913, it was published in conjunction with Cambridge University Press, with William Bayliss and Arthur Harden chairing the editorial board; the original title of The Bio-Chemical Journal [3] became The Biochemical Journal at that date. [4]

The journal at first appeared at irregular intervals, with between three and twelve issues appearing annually in a single volume. From 1948, two volumes were published annually, with four or five parts per volume, and the frequency increased rapidly over the years, reaching the current frequency of eight volumes in three parts in 1974. [5]

Current journal

Eight volumes are published each year with each volume consisting of three parts (24 issues per year).

To mark the centenary of the journal in 2006, a free online archive back to the journal's first issue in 1906 was launched. All papers are available as pdfs, and recent papers are also available in a proprietary format called Enhanced Electronic Serials Interface-View (EESI-View). The journal won the first Charlesworth Award of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) for Best Online Journal in 2007. [6] The judges described the online journal as '"visually attractive and easy to use ... maintains the character of the journal while exploiting the digital medium to offer a range of additional features".

Towards the end of 2009, the journal launched a new technological innovation: the Semantic Biochemical Journal. [7] The software used, Utopia Documents, transforms the content of the journal by dynamically linking documents to research data, enabling readers to interact with and manipulate the information in the journal's scientific papers more effectively. The software turns static images, tables, and text into objects that can be linked, annotated, visualized, and analysed interactively. [8]

Highly-cited papers

The journal has published many highly cited papers. There are more than 100 that have been cited more than 1000 times each, and the following have been cited more than 5000 times each:

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Elsevier Biobase, BIOSIS Previews, CAB International, Chemical Abstracts Service, Current Contents, Embase, International Food Information Service, MEDLINE/Index Medicus, ProQuest databases, and the Science Citation Index.

According to the Journal Citation Reports , the journal has a 2019 impact factor of 4.097. [9]

Related Research Articles

Frederick Sanger English biochemist

Frederick Sanger was an English biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is one of only two people to have done so in the same category, and the fourth person with two Nobel Prizes. In 1958, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin". In 1980, Walter Gilbert and Sanger shared half of the chemistry prize "for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids". The other half was awarded to Paul Berg "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA".

Hans Krebs (biochemist) British biochemist

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs was a German-born British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions that take place in the cells of humans and many other organisms, namely the citric acid cycle and the urea cycle. The former, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", is the key sequence of metabolic reactions that provides energy in the cells of humans and other oxygen-respiring organisms; and its discovery earned Krebs a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953. With Hans Kornberg, he also discovered the glyoxylate cycle, which is a slight variation of the citric acid cycle found in plants, bacteria, protists, and fungi.

Amos Bairoch

Amos Bairoch is a Swiss bioinformatician and Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the University of Geneva where he leads the CALIPHO group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) combining bioinformatics, curation, and experimental efforts to functionally characterize human proteins.

George Edward Briggs FRS was Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge.

Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.

UTOPIA (bioinformatics tools)

UTOPIA is a suite of free tools for visualising and analysing bioinformatics data. Based on an ontology-driven data model, it contains applications for viewing and aligning protein sequences, rendering complex molecular structures in 3D, and for finding and using resources such as web services and data objects. There are two major components, the protein analysis suite and UTOPIA documents.

William John Young

William John Young was an English biochemist.

Malcolm Dixon

Malcolm Dixon was a British biochemist.

Partition chromatography theory and practice was introduced through the work and publications of Archer Martin and Richard Laurence Millington Synge during the 1940s. They would later receive the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their invention of partition chromatography".

Douglas Bruce Kell is a British biochemist and Research Professor of Systems Biology in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool, and Chief Scientific Officer of Mellizyme Ltd. He was previously at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB). He founded and led the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. He served as chief executive officer (CEO) of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) from 2008 to 2013.

Hal Dixon (biochemist)

Henry Berkeley Franks Dixon D.Sc. was an Irish biochemist and Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Born in Dublin, the youngest son of Henry Horatio Dixon, he was interested in science from a young age; his discovery of an optical illusion arising from binocular vision was described by his father in Nature Magazine when he was only nine years old.

The Colworth Medal is awarded annually by the Biochemical Society to an outstanding research biochemist under the age of 35 and working mainly in the United Kingdom. The award is one of the most prestigious recognitions for young scientists in the UK, and was established by Tony James FRS at Unilever Research and Henry Arnstein of the Biochemical Society and takes its name from a Unilever research laboratory near Bedford in the UK, Colworth House.

Maximilian Nierenstein was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Bristol.

Utopia Documents is a semantic, scientific, web-enabled PDF reader that is part of the Utopia toolset. Utopia Documents can be downloaded for free.

Terri Attwood British bioinformatics researcher

Teresa K. Attwood is a Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computer Science and School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester and a visiting fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at University College London (UCL) from 1993 to 1999 and at the University of Manchester from 1999 to 2002.

Andy Brass

Andrew M. Brass is a Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Life Sciences.

Steve Pettifer

Stephen Robert Pettifer is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in England.

Sibyl Taite Widdows British chemist

Sibyl Taite Widdows (1876–1960) was a British Scientist and member of the Chemistry department at the London School of Medicine for Women for 40 years.

Athel Cornish-Bowden British biochemist

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Rita Casadio is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bologna.

References

  1. Barcroft, J. (1906). "The Oxygen Tension in the Submaxillary Glands and certain other tissues". The Biochemical Journal. 1 (1): 1–10. doi:10.1042/bj0010001. PMC   1276117 . PMID   16742011.
  2. 1 2 Clark J. Biochemical Journal Centenary (2006) (accessed 30 September 2007)
  3. 1 2 Anon (1906) Bio-Chemical Journal 1: i–iii (accessed 30 September 2007)
  4. Anon Biochemical Journal (1913) 7: i–vi (accessed 30 September 2007)
  5. BJ Central: Contents by Issue Archived October 26, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (accessed 30 September 2007)
  6. Biochemical Journal hits the heights The Biochemist (14 September 2007)]
  7. Attwood, T. K.; Kell, D. B.; McDermott, P.; Marsh, J.; Pettifer, S. R.; Thorne, D. (2009). "Calling International Rescue: Knowledge lost in literature and data landslide!". Biochemical Journal. 424 (3): 317–333. doi:10.1042/BJ20091474. PMC   2805925 . PMID   19929850.
  8. Attwood, T. K.; Kell, D. B.; McDermott, P.; Marsh, J.; Pettifer, S. R.; Thorne, D. (2010). "Utopia documents: Linking scholarly literature with research data". Bioinformatics. 26 (18): i568–i574. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btq383. PMC   2935404 . PMID   20823323.
  9. "Biochemical Journal". 2019 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2020.