Falling editorial standards

No, I’m not talking about the Adver, nor anything local for once.

It’s not every day that one comes across extreme profanity in an academic journal published by a learned society. However, the Royal Society of Chemistry have managed it. An article published in the journal Chemical Communications repeats one of the least acceptable four-letter-words of the English language, many times. Many, many times. The Society have even put a photo including said word on their website (and just in case they get a little churlish later on, I’ve stored a screenshot here). Those that have a subscription or feel that £22 is a reasonable price for a little hilarity at a stuffy academic society’s expense will see that never before have thin-walled and thick-walled copper nanotubes (and their pretty young friend, Bismuth nanotubes) been abbreviated to such effect.

What’s puzzling is how this ever made it into print. One can imagine a western colleague of the Chinese team that wrote the article ‘helping’ his colleagues with their English, wondering just how far the joke would get before someone pointed out the unfortunate acronym… and being somewhat amazed when it went as far as it did. But what about the editors at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s publishing branch in Cambridge? Either not a very worldly wise bunch, or too consumed by their high-brow interests to notice what’s now so obvious.

I see that The Register got there first ten days ago, but still worth a little extra publicity, methinks.