Foundations

About Nanojournal

Nanojournal is a reader's guide to nanoscience and to the research literature in which that science is published. It is written for students, researchers moving in from neighbouring fields, science writers and interested readers who want a clear route into a subject that is scattered across dozens of journals and several disciplines.

What the guide is

Nanojournal is an independent reader's guide to nanoscience and its research literature. It publishes no research of its own, sells nothing, and is not connected to any journal, publisher, university or government agency named on its pages. Nothing on this site is medical advice.

Within that scope, the guide does three things. It describes where nanoscale research is published and how the main journals differ. It explains how readers can find, follow and judge new papers. And it gives plain accounts of the subjects that fill those papers, from carbon nanotubes and quantum dots to self-assembly, probe microscopy and the biological questions studied under the headings of nanomedicine and nanotoxicology.

What the guide is not

It is not a journal. It does not accept or review manuscripts, and it does not number its pages as issues or volumes. It is not a database of papers and runs no search over the literature. It sends nothing by e-mail and keeps no list of readers. It carries no advertising, recommends no products, and does not offer opinions on the health effects of any material or treatment. Where a page touches on health research, it reports what a paper or review set out to study and what its authors reported, and it keeps their caveats.

How the pages are organised

The guide is arranged in five groups, which appear in the contents panel at the top of every page and in the index at the foot.

• The literature covers the journals, keeping up with new papers, searching and reading, and the research landscape of 2001 and 2002.
• Foundations covers definitions and scale, the history of the idea and a glossary.
• Materials takes nanotubes, fullerenes, graphene, quantum dots and metal nanoparticles in turn.
• Tools and devices covers microscopy, fabrication, molecular electronics, spintronics and molecular machines.
• Nano and biology covers self-assembly, DNA and peptide nanostructures, nanomedicine and nanotoxicology as research fields, and public policy.

Every page is written to stand alone, so a reader can arrive at any of them without having read the others. Where a page relies on an idea explained elsewhere, it links to that page in the text rather than repeating the explanation.

Who the guide is for

The pages assume curiosity rather than expertise. A student meeting nanoscience for the first time can read them in order, starting with the foundations; a researcher crossing from one discipline into another can go straight to the subject pages and the notes on reading papers; a writer or editor can use the glossary and the journals page to check terms and find where a subject is usually published. Each page states which sources it draws on, so a reader can always go one step further.

How sources are used

Each page cites a small number of outside sources in its running text: encyclopaedia articles for background and history, the pages that journals and prize committees publish about themselves, pages from public agencies, and a limited number of research papers and reviews identified by their PubMed records. The papers named on the site are few and deliberate. When a page describes one, it says what the authors set out to do and what their abstract reports, attributes that report to them, and avoids restating it as settled fact. No figures are given except where they are copied from a cited source and credited to it.

Readers who want the field's own official overview can go to the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, which publishes material on the United States National Nanotechnology Initiative, including its annual budget supplements. Its page about the initiative describes it as a government research and development initiative in which more than thirty federal departments, agencies and commissions coordinate their nanotechnology work. Journals, learned societies and universities publish a great deal more, and the journals page is the best starting point for those.

A note on terms

The guide uses nanoscience and nanotechnology almost interchangeably, following common usage, though the first stresses understanding and the second stresses making things. It uses British spelling (nanometre, colour) except in proper names and titles. Scientific names of techniques are spelled out on first use on each page, with the common abbreviation after them, and the glossary collects the abbreviations in one place.

The guide has no forum, comment system or correspondence address, and it asks nothing of its readers beyond attention. Its pages are revised when a cited source changes or when a clearer way to explain an idea turns up.