Created by Margret J. Geselbracht, Reed College () and posted on VIPEr ( on March 18, 2011. Copyright Margret J. Geselbracht 2011. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License. To view a copy of this license visit

What is Inorganic Chemistry?

How would you define the field?

List the different sub-disciplines of inorganic chemistry.

Examine the Table of Contents from a recent issue of Inorganic Chemistry, the flagship ACS journal of the field. As a group, mark-up one copy of the TOC to be returned to me with this sheet.

  • To the left of each article title, identify the sub-discipline(s).
  • Compile a brief list below of Expected and Unexpected topics and themes that emerge.
  • As a group, pick 1 article that you would like to read more about (identify with stars).

Follow-up on the “What is InorganicChemistry” Table of Contents first-day activity:

I have posted links on the Moodle for the TOC pages of the Inorganic Chemistry journal issues that you looked at on the first day of class (look in the Problem Set block). Note that the default view for these URLs shows, in addition to the titles and authors, a graphical “teaser” for the article. A picture is worth a thousand words. These images may change the initial classification of the article title that you assigned on Monday.

1. Either with your group or on your own, take some time to browse the complete TOC for the issue your group looked at. You can just focus on the list of article titles and graphical images; no need to look at abstracts or full text at this point.

2. Identify up to 3 articles for which a view of the TOC image changes the subdiscipline that you would assign for the article based on the title alone. For each case, report the DOI (digital object identifier, something like DOI: 10.1021/ic101789u), the article title, your original subdiscipline classification and your new subdiscipline classification.

3. After you have looked through the titles and graphical images for the entire issue, meet with your group to identify 1 article that you would like to learn more about. Report the DOI, the title, and a brief discussion of how your group decided on this paper. Note: Be sure it is something that you are all interested in!

Adapted from a learning object created by Barbara Reisner (James Madison University) and posted on VIPEr ( and further refined by Joanne Stewart (Hope College).