Talk:Energy profile (chemistry)

Peer review and responses during the educational assignment in Fall 2013
Introductory section is pretty easy to understand and it’s accessible to audiences with some general background in chemistry. I would suggest adding a simple energy coordinate diagram right at the beginning of the page so that people can get a quick idea or recall what a reaction coordinate diagram looks like.

For the 1st and 2nd part of page, I think a little reorganization of the contents will make them more comprehensible. I would suggest changing the first level heading to something more explicit, such as ‘Origin of Energy Profile/Energy coordinate diagram’. Then move part of the paragraph currently under ‘Reaction coordinate diagram’ to the beginning or add a brief paragraph explaining how ECD is basically a 1D-cross sectional profile of a multi-dimension potential surfaces, and next talk about the details on potential energy surfaces.

For the Sn1 vs Sn2 examples, perhaps some comments on which solvents turn out to accelerate the reaction would make them more complete.

There are more inter-page links need to be added. The (link) in the paragraph under ‘Charactering a PES’ is not linked. All the figures are very well drawn and they are definitely positive add to the text.

References are mostly books. Maybe a few references from scientific journal will make the sources more diverse? For example, I think it would be nice to have literature examples to illustrate the effect of solvent and catalyst on energy profiles. Besides that, I noticed that ref[3] is a lecture presentation/note, I would double check to see if it’s a valid reference.

Overall, this is a very well written draft and there are lots of useful contents being added compared to the existing page. Well done!

Tayrochemie (talk) 02:01, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Overall, I think you'be made a lot of improvements over the original, which clearly needed to be redone from the ground up. The intro is simple and easy to understand. The sections on potential energy surfaces and reaction coordinate diagrams are far more in depth than the original article. However, I'd point out that there is a separate page for potential energy surfaces. Your section here actually goes more in depth than that article. I'd think that either that other article should be deleted and combined into this one, or most of this in depth material should actually be there and replaced on this page with a link there and a short summary.

I think you've done a decent job of adding links to other relevant pages, though you could probably comb through it and add some more. One improvement might be to make sure you link to the other pages the first time you mention the topic. For a few things, the links came later when the topic was mentioned for the second or third time. I think it helps the reader to have them given earlier on. Also, it might be good to add a 'See Also' section at the end with the important links. Additionally, I'd make sure some of these other pages such as 'potential energy surfaces' and 'reaction coordinate' link back to the the page for 'energy profile'. Its a minor edit that helps users going both ways.

You've added many figures, and I think they help to illustrate the topic very well. I assume they are all original, but if not then make sure you cite them. There were also some rather large passages of text without any citations in them. I'm guessing you have references for these or just wrote them from your own knowledge, but its probably best to add references to support. When looking at your reference list, Wikipedia seems to think one of the ISBN numbers is wrong, best to double check that. Other than that, the references look decent, maybe add a review article or two. I liked that some of your sources were online, and therefore easy for others to access, but be sure to double check their validity. You seem to have completely redone the references and not used many of the originals, it might be worth checking to see if any of them are useful resources to link users to for more information.

In the applications section, I think the title 'Solvent Effects' is meant to be bolded and not in a box like it is.

In general, I think this is a major improvement over the original.

(DGH91 (talk) 04:45, 4 November 2013 (UTC))

Additional Comments
UMChemProfessor (talk) 02:02, 5 November 2013 (UTC) The page looks excellent, particularly the introduction and the figures. I agree with most of the peer reviewers thoughtful suggestions.

Suggestions from ChemLibrarian (talk) 15:13, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

 * 1) Just want to echo your reviewers' suggestions on referencing the figures when needed. Even though you have re-drawn them and the data or fact are not copyrightable, it's still ethical to give credits to original creators.
 * 2) Some of the images not from you were uploaded to Wikipedia instead of Wikimedia Commons. Please feel free to move them into Wikimedia Commons if you'd like to.
 * 3) The link to Strain in the Potential Surface Energies are broken because of the capitalization. Use this one strain.
 * 4) The wrong ISBN in your reference is the LCCN. The correct ISBN should be 1–891389–31–9.

Response to reviewers
Thank you all for taking the time to review our sandbox we will take time to consider each comment.

Tayrochemie
Your suggestion about adding a RCD in the introductory paragraph is something I was meaning to do but it slipped my mind; thank you for reminding me. I too feel it would help people remember what a RCD actually is. The organization is something we have been debating on and I will take your suggestions into consideration before having the page go live. Example solvents for the "solvent effects" were given but you have brought it to my attention that it should be more clearly stated (or stated multiple times). As for the references I wanted to avoid using scientific journals as a reference (or example reactions from these sources) because the main idea was illustrate the basic/general concept of how solvent effects can be accounted for using an RCD; there are other pages (which I have been meaning to link out to) that specifically deal with solvent effects and examples. Additionally, I wanted to use an example that could be recognized by even beggigning chemistry students (i.e. org. chem. I students) and illustrate the effects of solvent choice without trying to complicate the example too much; I figured SN1 SN2 mechanism are probably one of the first learned. The ref [3] are class notes but I think that for the audience (i.e. independent learners / unfamiliar readers) class notes are appropriate and the Professor David Sherrill is a well respected theoretical chemistry professor at Georgia Tech who has published over 130 journal articles and 7 book chapter/review articles. Also, he has a ton of independent learning aids here and here which I was trying to link to in the article. Thanks for your comments we will carefully consider each of the points you brought up.

Charco0917 (talk) 21:19, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

DGH91
Referring to your suggestion about the PES page; we also noticed that the PES and reaction coordinate page were lacking as well which made it difficult to not go into depth on certain topics (we actually considered revising all three pages) but we are know planning on moving the PES section to the PES page (it was just easier to edit it all in one sandbox). I agree with your comment on finding more links to other sites but I was just short on time I will try to be more adamant about finding links and the appropriate spots to put them in. I had not considered a see also section but I think it would be a great addition since there are several reputable online-accessable sources I wanted to include but did not specifically site, thank you. We also plan on adding the links to the RCD page from PES and reaction coordinate pages once our page goes live. There is one figure that will definitely require a reference (originally drawn but a conceptual reference is needed). As for the long unreferenced text I will try to correct but were there any specific cases ? Sometimes I am unaware what can be considered common knowledge. Most of the original pages references was not citing any information they were mostly just pictures, some of which were not even used in the article. I tried to find sources for information they used and we are also trying to salvage as much of the old page as possible but it is difficult when the information is unreferenced or out of place. Thank you for your comments we will consider each one in our final editing process.

Charco0917 (talk) 22:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

UMChemProfessor
Thank you, it means a lot. We both enjoyed working on this project and being able to contribute to wikipedia.

Charco0917 (talk) 22:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

ChemLibrarian
Thank you for taking the time to comment on our page we will fix the errors soon.
 * 1) All of the figures are originally drawn but the figure depicting the optimum bond angle and length of H2O will need to be referenced for the values. Thank you for bringing this up because it was something we were unclear about.
 * 2) I will try to upload the images to wikipedia commons as well, I did not know what it was when I was initially uploading the images.
 * 3) Thank you very much for that catch, it was bugging me.

Charco0917 (talk) 22:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank You Tayrochemie and DGH91 for taking efforts to review this article. Your suggestions were really helpful. UMChemProfessor, thank you for your comments. It really means a lot. Thank you ChemLibrarian for pointing out the editing mistakes and help with the references.

I agree with the reply by Charco0917 to all your suggestions. We have tried to incorporate the changes suggested by you, as an where we felt it was needed.

AimNature (talk) 21:56, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Symbol mistake in images
Lots of diagrams, for example, File:Reaction Coordinate Diagram.png in the lede, use ΔG≠ instead of ΔG‡. DMacks (talk) 04:23, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Reversible vs irreversible
It needs to be clarified that reversible vs. irreversible are always relative terms that depend on temperature and timescale, and there is not any particular equilibrium constant cutoff, beyond which a reaction becomes irreversible. At a high enough temperature, all reactions are reversible and thermodynamically controlled (neglecting other decomp pathways). Similarly, if you wait long enough, all reactions are also reversible (on that timescale) and thermodynamically controlled. (In fact, in principle, every process is somewhere on a continuum between thermo and kinetic control.)

The cited cutoff of 10^3 for an alleged irreversible reaction is especially objectionable, in my opinion. There are reactions (e.g. pyridinium OTs-catalyzed ketalization), where even a 10^-10 equilibrium is operative. As another example the reaction of ammonia and formic acid has an equilibrium constant of 10^13 to form ammonium formate, but on heating to 200 deg. C, the reaction is reversible, and eventually, the thermodynamic products water and formamide are made. Alsosaid1987 (talk) 23:32, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Strange end
Why this article have such a strange vertical end? Nimelik 20:07, 7 august 2020 (UTC)