ACS Symposium Series

About ACS Symposium Series

Overview: A Peer-Reviewed Book Series Built From Symposia

The ACS Symposium Series is a long-running series of peer-reviewed edited books published by the American Chemical Society in Washington, DC. It is not a journal, and treating it as one distorts everything else about it — its submission route, its costs, its metrics and the way its contents should be cited. Each volume is a self-contained book, usually developed from a symposium sponsored by an ACS technical division, often at an ACS national meeting, and edited by the symposium organisers or other specialists in the topic. The volume carries a sequential series number, its own ISBN and e-ISBN, and chapter-level digital object identifiers in the ACS Publications platform, where the books sit alongside the society's famous journals without being journals themselves.

The scale of the enterprise is considerable. When the ACS made the backfile available online, it described every book from this series and its companion Advances in Chemistry series dating from 1950 through 2009 as newly available in electronic form — nearly 1,200 e-books covering agricultural and food chemistry, cellulose and renewable materials, chemical education, organic chemistry, polymer chemistry, materials and many other fields. Series numbering had already passed one thousand volumes by the early 2010s and has continued since, with volume numbers in the 1200s appearing in the later 2010s. Few book series in any science can match that combination of longevity, volume and direct connection to a national scientific society's meeting programme.

For chemists, the series occupies a distinctive niche between conference proceedings and review literature. A symposium volume gathers, in one place, the state of a fast-moving topic as presented by the groups working on it — catalytic control of air pollution, fluid catalytic cracking, carbohydrate synthesis methods, dopamine receptors, biochemical engineering foundations, nutrition and exercise, humanitarian applications of chemistry, climate-change literacy and education, to name only a handful drawn from across the decades. Chapters are fuller than conference abstracts, are peer reviewed as book contributions, and are frequently cited for years, which is why university libraries have historically treated the series as a standing-order staple.

History and Development

The series took its modern form in the 1970s, although its roots lie in the ACS practice of publishing symposium-derived books, and the companion Advances in Chemistry series reaches back to 1950. Early volumes already show the format that persists today: a numbered volume, a named editor or editors with their institutional affiliations, a title page noting the symposium and the ACS division that sponsored it, and Library of Congress cataloguing that records the series ISSN 0097-6156. Volume 39, on synthetic methods for carbohydrates, came from a symposium of the Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry at the ACS centennial meeting in New York in 1976; volume 207, on foundations of biochemical engineering, from a 1982 winter symposium in Boulder; volume 316, on formaldehyde release from wood products, from the 189th national meeting in Miami Beach in 1985; volume 495, on catalytic control of air pollution, from the 202nd national meeting in New York in 1991. The pattern — division, meeting, symposium, book — is the series' DNA.

Two developments transformed access. The first was the migration of the books onto the ACS Publications platform, completed for the historical backfile around 2009, which gave chapters DOIs, HTML and PDF delivery, and linking to and from journal articles. The second was the normalisation of the electronic ISSN 1947-5918 alongside the print ISSN 0097-6156, reflecting that new volumes are now used predominantly in electronic form even though print editions continue. Citation practice evolved with the platform: the standard ACS style for a chapter — authors, chapter title, the words In followed by the book title, the editor, the series name and volume number, the publisher and city, the year and the pages — is taught in library guides precisely because students so often need to cite these volumes correctly.

Throughout, the series has remained a books programme of a learned society, managed through ACS Publications' books operation rather than through a journal editorial office. That governance explains its stability: divisions keep proposing symposia, editors keep turning the best of them into volumes, and the catalogue keeps growing in step with the discipline itself.

Aims, Scope and Subject Coverage

The scope is chemistry and its interfaces, in the full breadth of the ACS divisional structure. Organic, inorganic, analytical, physical, polymer, environmental, agricultural and food, medicinal, biochemical, nuclear, cellulose and renewable materials, chemical education, chemical information, materials chemistry and energy and fuels all appear repeatedly in the catalogue, together with interdisciplinary volumes on safety, history of chemistry, professional development and the societal dimensions of the science. A volume's scope is set by its symposium, so the series as a whole has no narrow aims-and-scope paragraph of the journal kind; its aim, visible across hundreds of volumes, is to capture coherent, timely clusters of research that a division judges important enough to convene around and to preserve in book form.

That symposium origin gives the volumes a characteristic texture. Most chapters are research contributions or substantive reviews by symposium participants, framed by an editor's preface that sets out why the topic mattered at that moment. Some volumes are effectively the reference record of a subfield at a date — the fluid catalytic cracking volume for refining chemists, the carbohydrate volumes for glycochemists — while others are deliberately forward-looking, assembling emerging methods before journal special issues catch up. Readers should therefore evaluate scope at volume level: read the preface, the contents list and the editor's credentials, all of which ACS displays on the volume's platform page.

• Recurring subject families include: Agricultural and food chemistry
• Polymer chemistry and materials science
• Environmental chemistry and pollution control
• Medicinal and biochemical topics
• Chemical education and public understanding of chemistry
• Energy, fuels and catalysis

Geographically and institutionally, authorship is international even though the convening society is American: symposia at ACS meetings draw contributors from universities, industry and government laboratories worldwide, and the historical volumes preserve contributions from figures such as Giulio Natta in polymer chemistry alongside generations of industrial researchers whose work appears in books more readily than in journals. That mixture of academic and industrial authorship is one of the series' enduring strengths.

Publication Details

The publisher is the American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, United States. The print ISSN of the series is 0097-6156, attested in Library of Congress cataloguing for volumes across many decades, and the electronic ISSN is 1947-5918; the pair appears in this site's structured record and in serials databases. Each volume has its own ISBN and e-ISBN, its own series number, and a book DOI under the ACS prefix 10.1021, with chapter DOIs formed on the pattern that includes the series abbreviation and volume number. Frequency is irregular and output-driven: multiple volumes appear in most years, none on a journal issue schedule, and there is no volume-issue numbering of the journal kind to cite.

Access is commercial. Volumes and individual chapters are sold and licensed through ACS Publications, typically reaching readers through institutional subscriptions and e-book collections; the series is not an open-access journal and there is no article processing charge, because authors do not pay a journal APC to place a chapter — they participate in a symposium and are invited or accepted as contributors to its volume. Any fee questions belong to the symposium and books process for a specific volume and should be put to its editors or to ACS Books, not inferred from journal publishing models. Print editions remain available for many volumes through booksellers, and the second-hand market in older hardcovers is extensive, a reminder of how widely the series was distributed in print.

Physical and digital extents vary with the symposium: volumes of ten to twenty-five chapters and a few hundred pages are typical, each with a subject index — a feature the series maintained in print long after many proceedings abandoned indexing, and one that still aids discovery in the electronic edition.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

Harvard Library's research guidance describes the series accurately as a series of peer-reviewed books developed from the ACS technical divisions' symposia, and that short description captures the editorial model. A division sponsors a symposium; its organisers, who become the volume editors, shape the programme and invite or select contributions; manuscripts are reviewed as book chapters under the editors' and ACS Books' oversight; and the society's books staff manage contracting, production and platform publication. There is no standing editor-in-chief for the series as a whole and no open portal at which any author may submit a chapter on any topic at any time.

This model has implications authors should understand. Acceptance depends on fit with a particular symposium's theme and programme, so the first step is participation in ACS divisional programming — presenting at the meeting, joining the relevant division, and responding when a symposium volume is being assembled. Editors may also commission chapters beyond the delivered papers to round out a volume, as the platform descriptions of several volumes note when chapters address subjects beyond what was covered at the meeting itself. Contributors should expect book-style requirements — chapter templates, permissions for reused figures, index awareness — rather than journal manuscript rules.

Post-publication, chapters are stable archival objects with DOIs; corrections follow book practice through the publisher. Libraries catalogue each volume individually, and abstracting services index chapters selectively by field, which is why a chapter may be discoverable in chemistry databases even though the series is a book programme.

Indexing, Abstracting and Metrics — Read Carefully

Because the series is covered in Scopus-derived systems, secondary listings attach journal-style figures to it: this record carries an SJR around 0.176, a Q4 quartile and an h-index of 78, figures that reflect genuinely heavy citation of the older literature — an h-index of that size for a book series indicates that dozens of volumes contain chapters cited dozens of times. Chemical Abstracts Service indexing has historically covered ACS books, and chapters are discoverable through the ACS platform's own search and through general scholarly search engines.

None of that makes the series a journal for metric purposes. It has no Clarivate Journal Impact Factor, and quoting an impact factor for it in a tenure file or a journal-selection decision would be a category error. The SJR and quartile labels are computed by SCImago for serials including book series, and a Q4 label for a symposium-book series does not carry the meaning it would for a research journal; conversely, the modest-looking metric figures understate the real influence of classic volumes that practitioners cite by book title decades later. Evaluate a volume by its editors, its contributors, its reviews in the chemical press and its citation record at chapter level.

Aggregators that promise an acceptance rate, a review speed or an APC for this title are inventing journal attributes for a book series; none of those quantities is publicly defined for the ACS Symposium Series, and any such figure should be disregarded. The honest metric summary is simple: long-established, society-published, Scopus-covered, heavily cited in places, and not Impact-Factor-bearing.

How to Publish in the Series

Plan around symposia, not submission windows. Join the ACS division closest to your field, follow its programming for national and regional meetings, and when a symposium on your topic is announced, submit an abstract through the ACS meeting system by the stated deadline. Discuss with the symposium organisers, early and explicitly, whether a book volume is planned and whether your contribution is a candidate for it; not every symposium becomes a book, and programme acceptance alone does not guarantee a chapter invitation.

If invited, write the chapter the editors commissioned: book chapters in this series typically allow more background, more complete experimental or methodological exposition and longer reference lists than a conference paper, and editors expect contributors to use that space to make the chapter a durable reference rather than a meeting handout. Clear permissions for any reused material, meet the production deadline — symposium volumes lose value if they appear long after the meeting — and check proofs at both chapter and volume level.

There is no APC to budget for, but there may be meeting costs — registration, membership, travel — attached to the symposium itself, and those are governed by ACS meeting policy, including any assistance schemes the society operates, rather than by the books programme. If anyone offers to secure you a chapter in this series for a fee, decline: that is not how ACS Books commissions volumes, and such offers are a known pattern in publication fraud.

Who Should Read and Cite It

Read the series when you need the consolidated view of a topic at a moment in time: a graduate student can reconstruct how a method developed by reading successive volumes, a practitioner can find industrial perspectives rarely aired in journals, and a historian of chemistry can trace what the American chemical community thought important, symposium by symposium, across half a century. Cite chapters precisely — authors, chapter title, book title, editors, series name and number, publisher, year, pages and DOI — following ACS style, which library guides illustrate with examples drawn from this very series.

For collection managers, the series remains a coherent society backfile whose online availability since the late 2000s, covering books from 1950 onward alongside the companion Advances in Chemistry series, makes it a single licensing decision rather than hundreds of individual purchases — the practical reason it appears in so many chemistry libraries worldwide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the ACS Symposium Series a journal?

No. It is a peer-reviewed edited book series of the American Chemical Society. Volumes are books with ISBNs and series numbers, developed mainly from divisional symposia; the society's journals are a separate portfolio.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0097-6156 and electronic ISSN 1947-5918. The print ISSN appears in Library of Congress cataloguing throughout the series' history; each volume additionally has its own ISBN and DOI.

Does it have an Impact Factor or an APC?

Neither in the journal sense. There is no Clarivate Journal Impact Factor for this book series and no article processing charge; access is by sale and institutional licence through ACS Publications.

How are volumes created?

An ACS technical division sponsors a symposium, usually at a national meeting; the organisers edit a volume from the symposium contributions, sometimes adding commissioned chapters, under ACS Books' peer-review and production processes.

How many volumes exist?

Well over a thousand. Numbering had passed 1,200 by the late 2010s, and the online backfile alone, covering 1950 to 2009 together with the Advances in Chemistry series, comprises nearly 1,200 e-books.

How should I cite a chapter?

Give chapter authors and title, then the book title, editors, ACS Symposium Series volume number, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, year, page range and chapter DOI, as in the examples in ACS style guides.

Conclusion

The ACS Symposium Series is one of the substantial monuments of twentieth- and twenty-first-century chemical publishing: a society's attempt, sustained over decades and more than a thousand volumes, to preserve not just results but whole conversations about where chemistry was going. Described honestly as what it is — peer-reviewed symposium books, not a journal — it needs no borrowed metrics to justify attention. Readers who cite its chapters carefully, and authors who enter it through the divisional symposia where it is born, will use it exactly as its editors intended.

Reading the Catalogue: Landmark Volumes and How to Find Them

Approaching a catalogue of more than a thousand volumes requires a strategy. Start from the topic, not the series: search the ACS Publications platform by subject keyword and limit the content type to books, or search a library catalogue by series name together with a subject word, since every volume is catalogued individually with its own title. The volume number is a rough guide to date, with low numbers belonging to the nineteen seventies and eighties, middle hundreds to the nineteen nineties and two thousands, and numbers above one thousand to the twenty-first century's second decade, so a citation's volume number alone often tells an experienced chemist approximately when a symposium was held. Preface texts, which ACS exposes on volume pages, are the fastest way to judge whether a particular book addresses the question you actually have, because editors customarily explain the symposium's purpose, the state of the field at the time, and how the chapters were assembled.

Certain volumes repay attention beyond their immediate subject because they document turning points: the early biochemical engineering collections record a discipline inventing itself, the catalysis and air-pollution volumes record environmental regulation reshaping industrial chemistry, and the more recent humanitarian and climate-literacy volumes record the society deliberately turning chemical expertise toward public problems. Doctoral students are often advised, sensibly, to read one classic symposium volume in their subfield from cover to cover, because the format, with its generous background sections and complete reference lists, teaches the shape of a research area in a way that a pile of disconnected journal articles rarely does.

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