MolBank

About MolBank

About Molbank

Molbank is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal from MDPI devoted to a publishing task almost no other journal performs: it is a depository of chemical information built from one-compound-per-paper short notes on synthetic compounds and natural products. Its ISSN is 1422-8599, the single ISSN in this site's saved record, on the journal's own MDPI pages, and in its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record. MDPI states the primary aim plainly: to provide a depository of chemical information that will facilitate the chemists of tomorrow in their research and discovery. Everything distinctive about Molbank — its article types, its brevity, its exclusions, its modest price — follows from that depository mission. A compound that has been made, characterised and honestly reported should not vanish into a laboratory notebook merely because a full paper cannot be built around it; Molbank exists so that it does not.

The journal publishes two report types, and the distinction between them is the first thing a prospective author must grasp. "Short Notes" report data for previously unpublished single molecules — one compound per paper. "Communications" report preliminary but significant results, and may involve more than a single compound. Reports that concentrate primarily on the structure determinations of novel compounds are also a feature of the journal. Against those inclusions, MDPI states the exclusions with equal clarity: articles providing a detailed discussion of the properties or uses of the molecules presented do not fall within the journal's remit, and reports focused on the biological activity or the materials-chemistry applications of compounds are better suited to other journals. Molbank wants the compound, its preparation and its characterisation data — complete, checkable and reusable — and deliberately leaves the exploitation of the compound to venues built for that argument.

Scope in detail

The scope list on the journal's aims page is short enough to quote in substance: organic synthesis and biosynthesis; natural product isolation and derivatization; and structural elucidation, by X-ray crystallography, NMR and related methods. The OpenAlex topic profile for the journal, from the direct fetch of source S51894404, shows what that scope produces in practice: the largest clusters are synthesis and biological activity of compounds, structural and chemical analysis of organic and inorganic compounds, synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, synthesis and characterisation of heterocyclic compounds, and crystal structures of chemical compounds. Heterocycles dominate because heterocyclic chemistry is where single new compounds are most often made in the course of larger programmes and most often left unpublished; Molbank's archive is, in effect, a long salvage operation for that stratum of the synthetic record, carried out compound by compound since the journal became independent.

A typical Short Note is therefore a compact, data-dense object: the preparation of one previously unpublished molecule, with the experimental procedure and the characterisation — melting point, NMR spectra, infrared, mass spectrometry, elemental analysis or high-resolution mass data, and crystallographic data where a structure has been determined — presented so that another chemist can repeat the preparation and verify the identity of the product. The value of such a note is cumulative and practical: it prevents duplicated effort, it anchors a compound's existence and data in the citable record, and it feeds the databases and search tools through which working chemists actually look compounds up. Authors should write to that use: completeness and accuracy of data matter more here than rhetorical framing.

History: from a section of Molecules to a journal of its own

Molbank began inside another journal. Reference summaries of the journal's history record that it was established in 1997 as a section of Molecules, MDPI's flagship chemistry journal, and was published in that form from 1997 to 2001 before splitting into a journal in its own right. OpenAlex's source record gives 2002 as the first year of its independent record, and this site's saved record likewise gives coverage from 2002 — the two dates reconcile as the section years and the standalone years of one continuous title, not as competing claims. The journal has therefore carried its depository mission for well over two decades, first as an experiment inside a young open access journal and then as a small independent title inside what became one of the world's largest open access publishers. Its present MDPI journal page describes it as published bimonthly online; some third-party summaries still describe it as quarterly, a reflection of its earlier rhythm, and the publisher's own current description is the one to rely on.

Open access, the DOAJ record and the article processing charge

All articles in Molbank are open access under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, with copyright retained by the authors, as the journal's copyright statement sets out. The journal is listed in DOAJ: a DOAJ search-API query run for this profile returned the journal's record, naming MDPI AG of Switzerland as publisher, an article processing charge of CHF 500, and the CC BY licence. OpenAlex's source record independently lists the same APC price, 500 Swiss francs, flags the source as open access and as in DOAJ, and names the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute as host organisation, with Switzerland as the country — the same publisher and country as this site's record, where the publisher taxonomy entry is the full MDPI name. An APC of CHF 500 is, by the standards of open access chemistry publishing, very low, and it is low because the product is deliberately small: a short, standardised, data-centred article type is cheaper to review, edit and produce than a full research paper, and the journal's pricing reflects that economy rather than a discount on rigour.

Speed, visibility and editorial standards

MDPI's journal page, in the figures it presents for the journal, reports that manuscripts are peer-reviewed with a first decision provided approximately 14.7 days after submission, and acceptance to publication undertaken in 3.7 days, as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026 — publisher-supplied medians, attributed here as such. For the journal's article types those speeds are credible in a way they might not be for long research papers: a one-compound note presents a referee with a bounded verification task — is the compound new, is the preparation reproducible as written, do the data support the structure — and a well-prepared submission can be judged quickly. The same page states the journal's indexing as Scopus, ESCI (the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science), Reaxys, and CAPlus / SciFinder, among other databases; for a data-depository journal, the chemical databases matter as much as the citation indexes, since Reaxys and SciFinder are where compound data are actually retrieved in practice.

Editorial standards follow MDPI's house framework, which the journal page summarises: MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), enforces a peer-review and ethics regime the publisher describes as rigorous, and uses iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications for originality. The editorial office contact given on the journal's page is molbank@mdpi.com. In an interview published in the journal's announcements, the incoming editor-in-chief described the journal's appeal in terms that match its founding mission — a unique venue that lets chemists report the preparation of compounds that might otherwise never have seen the light of day, in short, focused reports — and set out ambitions to grow submissions and visibility and to publish work intersecting with newer preparative methods, naming mechanochemistry, electrochemistry, photochemistry and flow processing among the tools of interest. Authors preparing compounds by those methods, and wondering whether a single-compound outcome has a home, can take that as a direct invitation.

Metrics, read honestly

OpenAlex records 1,977 works and 3,192 citations for Molbank, a source h-index of 15, an i10-index of 41 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.50; the journal's MDPI page presented 1,968 articles in the count visible when this profile was prepared, a close agreement that supports the OpenAlex works figure. This site's saved record gives an h-index of 13 and an impact factor of 0.3; SCImago-derived aggregator summaries give an h-index of 12 to 13, a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.142, a CiteScore of 0.8 and a Q4 position in biochemistry and related categories, while other aggregator summaries put a recent impact factor at 0.4. The variation between 0.3 and 0.4 across sources and years should be reported as exactly that — variation by source and year — rather than resolved into a single false precision. The substantive point is stable across all sources: Molbank is a small, low-citation-density journal, which is precisely what a depository of single-compound notes should be expected to be. Individual notes are cited occasionally, when the compound matters to later work; the archive's usefulness is measured in lookups and reuse as much as in citations.

Is Molbank right for your compound?

Submit here when you have a previously unpublished compound, fully characterised, whose preparation and data deserve a permanent citable record but do not constitute a full paper; when a preliminary synthetic result is significant enough to register but not yet a complete study; or when a structure determination should enter the record. Do not submit here a paper whose argument is a compound's biological activity, materials performance or detailed properties and uses — the journal states in its own aims that such reports fall outside its remit, and a desk decision to that effect wastes everyone's time; MDPI's own portfolio contains the fuller chemistry titles, Molecules among them, for such work. Prepare the note as the depository object it is: exact procedure, complete spectra and analytical data, honest yields, and characterisation sufficient for a stranger to repeat the work. In return the journal offers CC BY open access, a CHF 500 charge, decisions in weeks rather than months on the publisher's reported medians, indexing in the chemical databases where compound data are searched, and a permanent place in a collection whose whole purpose is that no well-made compound should be lost to the record.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN? 1422-8599, as given on the journal's MDPI pages, in DOAJ and in this site's record.

Who publishes Molbank? MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), Basel, Switzerland.

What does it publish? Short Notes reporting data for previously unpublished single molecules (one compound per paper), Communications of preliminary but significant results, and structure-determination reports, across organic synthesis and biosynthesis, natural product isolation and derivatization, and structural elucidation.

What does it not publish? Reports centred on the detailed properties or uses of molecules, including biological-activity-focused and materials-applications-focused reports, which the journal's aims assign to other venues.

What does it cost, and under what licence? An APC of CHF 500 per the DOAJ record and the journal's charge information; articles are open access under CC BY, with copyright retained by authors.

Where is it indexed? Per the publisher: Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), Reaxys and CAPlus / SciFinder, among others; it is also listed in DOAJ, confirmed by the search-API record obtained for this profile.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex: 1,977 works, 3,192 citations, h-index 15. Aggregator figures: SJR 0.142, CiteScore 0.8, impact factor reported as 0.3–0.4 depending on source and year; this site records Q4.

Why a depository journal matters: the compound that would otherwise be lost

The problem Molbank solves is real and familiar to every synthetic chemist. A research programme aimed at a target, a method or a biological question typically generates far more new compounds than it publishes. Intermediates are made, characterised and set aside; analogues are prepared for a screen that is never run, or run and unremarkable; a route is explored, yields a handful of new molecules and is abandoned when a better route succeeds. Under the ordinary economy of publishing, almost all of those compounds disappear. A full paper requires a story — novelty of method, significance of result, application demonstrated — and one well-made molecule with clean spectra is not a story. Yet the compound was new, its data were measured, and the next chemist who reaches the same intermediate will repeat the work in ignorance, or waste weeks establishing that a structure the literature appears to contain was never in fact reported with data.

Molbank's Short Note is engineered against exactly that loss. By fixing the unit of publication at one compound, and by requiring the preparation and characterisation data that make the report reusable, the journal turns a laboratory by-product into a permanent, citable, searchable record. The editor-in-chief's description of the journal, in the publisher's own announcement interview, makes the same point from the inside: the venue lets chemists report the preparation of compounds that might otherwise never have seen the light of day, in reports that are short, focused and interesting, from an editor who came to the role through reviewing and associate-editing for the journal after publishing in it himself. That trajectory matters for trust in a depository: the journal is run by someone whose own compounds are in it.

The model's second virtue is honesty of scale. Because a Short Note claims only what it contains — this compound, made this way, with these data — the refereeing question is sharp and the literature stays clean: a Molbank record does not inflate a molecule into a discovery, and later workers can rely on the data without discounting for promotional framing. The exclusions in the aims protect that clarity from both directions: authors are not tempted to pad a note with speculative discussion of properties and uses, and readers are not misled about what a note establishes. Combined with CC BY licensing, a CHF 500 charge, indexing in the compound-search databases and a backfile running, through its Molecules section years and its standalone years together, across more than two decades of synthetic practice, the result is a small journal with a distinct and durable function in the chemical literature — one that larger, story-driven titles, for all their higher metrics, do not perform.

Practical notes for submitting authors

Authors should confirm, before drafting, that the compound is genuinely previously unpublished; the Short Note format exists for new molecules, and the journal's checking tools and referees are oriented to exactly that question. The characterisation package should be assembled as the referees will test it: a preparation written so it can be repeated without private knowledge, yields stated plainly, and the spectral and analytical evidence — NMR, infrared, mass spectrometry, elemental analysis or accurate mass, and crystallographic data where a structure rests on it — complete enough to establish identity and purity. Where the work belongs instead to a Communication, the significance of the preliminary result should be arguable in a few paragraphs; where the argument has grown into properties, activity or application, the manuscript has outgrown this journal and should be redirected before submission, using the remit statements in the aims as the test. Finally, authors should keep the journal's own numbers in proportion: the publisher's reported decision medians are fast, the charge is low, and the archive's citation density is modest by design, so the return on a Molbank note should be reckoned in permanence, findability and reuse of the compound's data — the currencies the journal was founded to pay in.

One further record-keeping note: the journal's name is styled "Molbank" on its own pages and in its ISSN record, while this site and several databases render it "MolBank", with a capital B. The two forms name the same journal, and searches, citations and duplicate checks should always be reconciled by the ISSN, 1422-8599, before any conclusion is drawn from a title-string difference. The twin checks run for this profile, by ISSN and by both title spellings, returned only this post for this journal on this site, alongside unrelated MDPI titles such as Molecules — the journal from which Molbank originally split — which share a publisher and an audience but are distinct journals with distinct ISSNs and remits.

That reconciliation by ISSN, rather than by name, is also the correct way to read the journal's presence across the wider MDPI portfolio, where several chemistry titles share editors, authors and subject vocabulary: identity follows the ISSN and the remit, not the branding.