Research has shown that students can find it difficult to interpret and understand the information in journal articles, which can cause problems when they arrive at university and need to start using journals independently. As an organisation with a market leading journal portfolio and ambitions to encourage the growth of the chemical sciences by the dissemination of chemical knowledge, we decided to tackle this problem by creating an annotated journal article series.

The series is basically a selection of articles from a wide variety of our journals, and from a range of chemistry disciplines, that have been re-written by the authors into a standard accessible format and divided into set sections. The sections include areas such as looking at why the study was important, what procedures were used and what was the overall plan. The articles contain links to glossary terms, ChemSpider entries, related journal articles, books and relevant Learn Chemistry resources, such as videos of techniques, and resources on theory and activities. 



Ideally the articles will be used by students and teachers to enable better access to information in scientific journal articles, and to make students aware of the different ways that they can access information within an article. We have also just commissioned a guide detailing where to find relevant information within any journal article. This will be available as a stand-alone resource, and in addition will be linked to at the correct places from within the annotated article.

The second annotated journal article has just been uploaded, and you can find all of the annotated articles on Learn Chemistry.

This project is still in its infancy so any suggestions or improvements would be great. The selection process for these articles is still very much under review as well, so any ideas on what sort of article you'd like covered in the future, or any criterai we should use, would be welcome too.