In 2003, C&EN celebrated the 125th volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society with a special series of articles. "JACS at 125" highlighted select papers from among JACS' 125 most cited.

January 27, 2003

• SYMMETRY RULES!
  Woodward and Hoffmann paper in 1965 set rules for predicting stereochemistry of electrocyclic reactions.

February 17, 2003

• HARD AND SOFT ACIDS AND BASES
  Ralph Pearson's qualitative principle provides a useful way to predict chemical reactivity

March 24, 2003

• ATOMIC DISTANCES
  Linus Pauling's landmark paper in 1947 predicts metallic radii of most elements

April 21, 2003

• PEPTIDES ON DEMAND
  Bruce Merrifield's 1963 paper paved the way for automated synthesis of peptides and proteins

May 19, 2003

• HAMMOND POSTULATE
  1955 paper used transition-state theory to explain structure-reactivity relationships

June 16, 2003

• STRAIGHTENING OUT ENZYME KINETICS
  Lineweaver and Burk's 1934 paper showed biochemists a better way to plot their data

July 21, 2003

• CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT
  Charles J. Pedersen's 1967 'blockbuster' paper reported discovery of crown ethers and their complexes

August 18, 2003

• IT'S ALL IN THE INTERFACE
  Self-assembled monolayers with controllable properties have led to functional materials

September 29, 2003

• JUST SURFACE DEEP, BUT NOT SHALLOW
  Irving Langmuir and Katharine Blodgett brought new depth to molecule-thick films with papers published in 1918 and 1935, respectively.

October 27, 2003

• A PRACTICAL REACTION
  Titanium-catalyzed asymmetric epoxidation paved the way to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry

November 17, 2003

• AN ELECTRIC MOMENT
  Correction of Debye theory to predict dielectric constants of polar liquids had far-reaching effect

December 22, 2003

• KARPLUS EQUATION
  Theoretical calculation links NMR coupling constant to molecular geometry

View the complete list of the 125 most cited publications.