PREFACE

This 70th volume of Advances constitutes a small supplementary issue that pauses

to review the evolution of the series since it began under the title Advances in

Carbohydrate Chemistry toward the close of the Second World War, and looks

toward its future as Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry in the

ongoing documentation of a vastly expanded field of scientific disciplines where

carbohydrates play a role.

The volume opens with an appreciation of the career of Struther Arnott and his

contributions to our understanding of polysaccharide structure by use of X-ray

diffraction studies of oriented fibers. The celebrated work of Crick and Watson,

unraveling the structure and anticipating the all-encompassing biological role of

DNA, was based on the X-ray diffraction studies by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind

Franklin at King’s College, London. Arnott’s later work in Wilkins’ laboratory

greatly extended our knowledge and understanding of the three-dimensional archi-

tecture of a wide range of polynucleotide chains by application of his Linked-Atom

Least-Squares (LALS) methodology. Arnott’s biographer, Rengaswami Chandrase-

karan, details his subsequent researches at Purdue University in the USA that extend

the compass of the technique to the structural characterization of a broad range of

polysaccharides having relevance in both biological and technological areas.

Equipped with great research talent, coupled with high administrative capacity,

Struther Arnott fulfilled important leadership roles at Purdue and subsequently at

St. Andrews University in his native Scotland. The Bibliography appended to the

memoir provides a comprehensive source of reference to the many polysaccharide

structures expertly documented by the Arnott research teams.

The Advances series set out in 1944 with the objective of presenting critical and

integrating reports, understandable by the general reader as well as the specialist, on a

wide range of topics having carbohydrates as a common theme. The report “Seven

Decades of Advances” in this current volume assesses broadly the literature record on

carbohydrates, as documented in over 350 articles published in this series during the

seventy years of its existence, and its relation to research papers published in primary

journals, as well as information in reference books, monographs, and text books that

constitute the secondary literature.

At the time this series began, reports on original research were being published in a

wide range of national journals and in many different languages. Some papers

described sound, original, and novel work, but others may have had errors of fact,

be of dubious originality, or had failed to give credit to relevant prior work. Although

ix

x PREFACE

the more-prestigious national journals exercised a level of quality control, the peer-

review system had not then developed to its current broad extent. In areas such as the

carbohydrates, where a uniform system of nomenclature did not exist, there was a

great deal of confusion in naming compounds and in their structural depiction.

It was the goal of a small group of leading carbohydrate chemists, notably Melville

L. Wolfrom and Claude S. Hudson in the USA, and Sir Norman Haworth in Great

Britain, and with the strong support of a far-sighted publisher, Kurt Jacoby (who had

just founded Academic Press), to produce an annual book series featuring reports

from invited experts on a wide distribution of topics related to carbohydrates. These

areas would include simple sugars, glycosides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides,

and deal with their structures, chemical and biochemical reactions, analytical chem-

istry, food and fiber technology, and other aspects.

Their endeavors set the stage from which the 70 volumes of Advances subsequently

developed during a span of seven decades, averaging one volume per year. The

authors contributing to the early volumes came mainly from North America and

Great Britain, but the sources have expanded progressively to include articles from

authors in countries throughout the world, from Europe, Australia, New Zealand,

South America, Asia, and Africa. During this period, Academic Press took a prom-

inent position in documenting other aspects of the carbohydrate field, with such series

as Whistler’s Methods and Aspinall’s Polysaccharides volumes, and the Pigman

books. When Academic Press became part of the Elsevier line, the breadth was

further enhanced with the founding of the journal Carbohydrate Research.

The articles published in Advances have adhered to the original policies of its

founders, and many of them remain definitive treatments of their subject, while others

reflect advances in areas still in the course of rapid development. Collected here in

chronological sequence are the published Prefaces to the individual volumes, and

these describe the subject material in all of the individual articles, as well as providing

contemporary commentary at the time the volumes were published.

Parallel with the evolution of the series there has been important progress in

defining the language of scientific communication through agreements on standard-

ized nomenclature; this has been regularly documented in the pages of the Advances

volumes. It is a tribute to the cooperative efforts volunteered by a number of

individuals that the standardization reflected in the volumes has served as a bench-

mark for widespread adoption of these nomenclature recommendations by authors

throughout the world.

An important feature of Advances has been regular obituary reports that document

the lives and motivations of major figures who have made significant contributions to

the carbohydrate field. For the particular benefit of researchers who may not have had

PREFACE xi

the opportunity to meet or hear these past leaders in person, this volume features a

collection of portraits of all of those past leaders whose stories have been told in the

various volumes.

The editorship of the series was, with one brief interruption, in the hands of its

prime motivator, M. L. Wolfrom, until his death in 1969. Robert Stuart Tipson shared

the editorship with Wolfrom, starting with Volume 8 in 1954. He worked jointly with

the present editor until Volume 48 (1990), with the latter continuing thereafter.

The initiative of Academic Press to make back issues of Advances accessible

electronically was significantly enhanced when the Elsevier organization established

electronic access to a wide swath of the literature on carbohydrates through Science

Direct, Scopus, and other sources. The massive chemical database of Chemical

Abstracts provides records on individual carbohydrates and their derivatives, esti-

mated to comprise at least 5% of the 73 million or more substances in the CAS

Registry, and all are accessible electronically through SciFinder.

A bibliometric analysis of Advances, made in early 2013 by Professor Todd Low-

ary, revealed that 68 volumes of the series since the first issue had a total of 358

individual articles, carrying altogether 24,558 literature citations. These reports were

cited 20,582 times, with an average of 70 citations per article and a 2012 impact factor

of 7.133. The five most-cited reports were Bock and Pedersen’s 13C-NMR of mono-

saccharides article in Volume 41, with 1303 citations, the Schauer report on sialic

acids in Volume 40 (858 citations), the Volume 41 1H-NMR glycoprotein article by

Vliegenthart, Dorland, and van Halbeek (843 citations), the Schmidt–Kinzy trichloro-

acetimidate methodology in Volume 50, cited 694 times, and Legler’s article in

Volume 48 on the mechanism of glycoside hydrolases, which had 593 citations.

The content of this Advances series provides a large and unified source of reliable

reference material contributed by noted experts in the field, and is presented in clear,

understandable English without unnecessary jargon or incomprehensible acronyms.

The excellent support of the contributing authors and members of the Board of

Advisors is expected to assure a fruitful ongoing continuation of the series in the

service of the carbohydrate community.

DEREK HORTON

Washington, D.C.

Columbus, Ohio, September 2013