Analytica—A Journal of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Analysis

Back in 1894, Wilhelm Ostwald defined analytical chemistry as “the art of recognizing different substances and determining their constituents”, which “occupies a prominent position among the applications of science, since the questions it allows us to answer arise wherever chemical processes are used for scientific or technical purposes”. In 1993, the Working Party of Analytical Chemistry (WPAC), held in Edinburgh, UK, stated that analytical chemistry “is that scientific discipline that develops and applies methods, tools and strategies to obtain information on the composition and nature in space and time”.

Nowadays, these definitions remain very modern and, above all, they are reflected in an uncountable number of application sectors, ranging from biology, geology, environmental sciences, agricultural chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, and materials science, to social sciences and, of course, in chemistry itself. Often, this discipline is relegated into a corner and considered merely a support for other subjects; this, however, is without realizing that without it and, above all, without its principles, theories, and tools, nothing could make any applicative or rational sense.

When I was contacted by MDPI to perform the functions of editor for a new journal—“Analytica”—I was frightened by the difficulty of the task, and immediately wondered on what I could focus my attention, given the complexity of the discipline and its vastness, as well as its beauty and elegance of presentation. Immediately, I realized that, as is also the scenarios of other current journals (more or less noble and historical), often a sectioning of publications is observed, based on techniques (e.g., only electrochemistry, only chromatography, and only sensors) or applications (e.g., environmental, organic, and food). In reality, however, as huge as analytical chemistry may be, such a sectioning process is often difficult to conduct, as methods, tools, intuitions, or procedures “born” in one field often find valid application in other sectors.

The guiding thread that led me, therefore, in sketching the aim and scope of this journal was precisely this: not to limit the audience of possible authors, but, on the contrary, to try to gather, in a single journal, all the different souls that make up this discipline. This includes new applications, such as chemometrics and “omics” in all its variants, as well as keeping an eye, especially, on the industrial (quality control) and legal (forensic) components of the discipline. This approach will hopefully highlight the fact that analytical chemistry is really a single, large community, where common principles and theories are applied and declined according to the problems studied. In the end, the things that unite us are far more numerous, and more important, than the ones that divide us.

The general idea is to have many different types of contributions (i.e., regular research papers, short communications, discussions, letters, perspectives, and reviews) that allow us to speed up—while maintaining a very high quality standard of—the process of spreading new knowledge regarding systems and real sample analyses (i.e., new approaches, novel combinations of techniques, or improvements to analytical performances), divided into the various application sectors. The full details on experiments, materials, and methods must be provided for a research article, so that its results can be reproduced. In addition, compared to other journals, there is no restriction on the length of the papers or the number of electronic supplementary files, precisely in order to provide a completeness of information, without having to conduct the “character count”.

The journal will publish articles on all aspects of fundamental and applied analytical chemistry. The scope includes chromatography (i.e., GC, HPLC, UPLC, SFE, HPTLC, GC × GC, and LC × LC), hyphenated instrument configurations (e.g., LC–MS), and new devices, sample pretreatment and extraction, electroanalysis (i.e., voltammetry and polarography), sensors (i.e., chemosensors and biosensors), imaging (i.e., AFM, TEM), spectroscopy (i.e., chemi- and bio-luminescence, fluorescence, UV/Vis, IR, Raman, MS, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, and absorption and emission spectroscopy), thermal analysis, chemometrics, machine learning and deep learning. Accepted papers can cover the various application fields of analytical chemistry, such as the environmental, biological, clinical/pharmaceutical, “-omics” (i.e., proteomics and metabolomics), forensic, and industrial (quality control) application fields.

Sections will be available in order to address each manuscript to the most suitable editor, who should have an immediate understanding of the topic at hand and its state of the art. This, in turn, will assure that manuscripts will immediately find their best reviewers and their dedicated audience, while maintaining the unity within analytical chemistry that is the leitmotif and raison d’être of this journal.

On behalf of the editorial board, I invite you to submit your articles to Analytica and make the journal a renowned platform for interdisciplinary discussion and knowledge distribution in the field of analytical chemistry and the applied analytical chemistry sciences of the next decade.