Verify Twice, Publish Once

The message behind an old carpenter’s adage ‘measure twice, cut once’ can be applied to the process of structure elucidation as ‘verify twice, publish once’. Committing the time to double check a candidate structure against the experimental data can save a lot of hassles and embarrassment from a mistake being published/presented/stored/reported. Without picking on a specific case, journals are littered with examples of incorrect structures.

As the holidays approach, Philosophy to Chemistry to Elucidation blogging will be taking a short break and will resume in the new year. In the meantime, the following link is an interesting read on the importance of shape within the field of Chemistry: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 30 (1991)1-16.