Talk:Physical organic chemistry

Hello. I am a graduate student at the University of Michigan. We are editing Wikipedia articles related to physical organic chemistry as a class project. My partner and I are editing and improving the general "Physical Organic Chemistry" page. Our sandbox will be turned in October 28, 2013. Our sites will be peer reviewed by November 4, 2013, and the graded sites will go live on November 11, 2013. Here is a link to the sandbox for this project. RLM0518 (talk) 20:41, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Peer Review #1
The introduction should be easily understood by a broad audience. I would like to add that there are a few grammatical errors in the introduction ( “how they can be optimized (understood?) through experimental “ and “It can be through (thought) of” ). I would like to commend you on the sheer amount of material you added to the page, although I feel that it has lost its focus. Several sections are mere descriptions of another topic and do not relate back to the idea of physical organic chemistry. I would recommend that instead of describing each topic provide a 1-2 sentence description (as shown on the organic chemistry page) followed by an example of how physical organic chemists have used each area and then link the respective main articles as you have for many for further reading. This may be difficult because we spend several lectures on each topic but a few sentences summarizing that type of information may help focus each section. Some sections seem to be complete summaries of other fields such as quantum chemistry, again with no clear link to how it relates to physical organic. However the page does a great job a linking to other articles to provide addition resources for each topic.

The figures appear to be original and high quality with correct structures. It may be my personal preference but I would like more figures as there are several sections without figures. Again if some examples are provided to how each topic relates to physical organic chemistry then this is a great way to add figures to reinforce what you are trying to describe.

There is definitely more than 8 resources of which several are non-journal sources. You may be able to cut back on the amount of resources which may seem overwhelming to some by going into less detail about topics that are covered elsewhere on wikipedia.

Overall I think you did a great job of adding material to the page although as I’ve mentioned before I think that focusing each topic could improve the article. Physchem 13 (talk)

Peer Review #2
Content I don’t think the introduction is accessible to non-experts. There are a few terms that the non-experts would not know such as kinetic analysis, thermochemistry, trapping intermediate and characterization, etc. The introduction seems too detailed. Try to make the to make the introduction simpler so that the general public would understand. Overall, the content of each section does justify their length. There is at least one paragraph describing each section. Many important terms/ concepts are linked to their respective Wikipedia pages for further reference. The linked pages provide more in depth descriptions on the terms. This Wikipedia page does not seem to be duplicative of content on another Wikipedia page. Duplication is avoided by referencing Wikipedia pages.

Figures' A few figures on Wikipedia page do not seem to be original. The crown ether, 18-crown-4-“host” and potassium cation “guest” is already illustrated on the crown ether Wikipedia page. I would draw another image that depicts non-covalent interactions. Also, the Keto-enol tautomerization of acetylacetone already is depicted in one of your reference articles, reference #16- Predicting the tautomeric equilibrium of acetylacetone in solution. It would be beneficial to come up with another figure that is original and demonstrates how solvents influence the rate of a reaction. For the catalytic reaction coordinate figure, I would point the energy of activation (ΔG-double dagger) on the figure. I like the figure showing the cyclohexane elimination reaction. The mechanism of the reaction is clear and correct. The figures are informative and text explains the figures will. The figures that were drawn on Chemdraw are correct, easy to read, and are aligned. Just try to add more figure that are original.

Reference There are a total of 26 references on the Wikipedia page. The references are inclusive of review articles, textbooks, and literature article. The references are used correctly in the Wikipedia page.

Overall Presentation Overall, I think that the Wikipedia page looks good. The description of each section is detailed and clear. Multiple linked to different Wikipedia pages are provided to give the general public more information about certain topic. The descriptions for the figures are clear and are appropriate for the section. To make the Wikipedia page even better, I would draw figures that are original, make the introduction of the Wikipedia page simple and general so that the general public will understand the overall importance of physical organic chemistry. genger14 (talk)

Physchem 13 (talk) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Genger14 (talk • contribs) 02:52, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Additional Comments
UMChemProfessor (talk) 02:37, 5 November 2013 (UTC) I agree that in some sections there is a clear connection between the topic and physical organic chemistry, whereas other sections the connection is not as clear. Several of the figures are too small to read and should be enlarged. All figures should be the same (chemical) size. The peer reviewers also have some great suggestions.

Suggestions from ChemLibrarian (talk) 03:44, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

 * 1) You added nice images but all of them are in thumbnail. For some places it's good but for most paragraphs, you probably want to enlarge the picture and place them at the center of the page so that people can read them without clicking on them and the whole page can flow better too. See this page Picture tutorial for how to place the image at different places and adjust the size.

Response to Peer Reviewers
Thank you all for your excellent suggestions. They were very helpful in working to improve the article. Thank you as well for noticing our large amount of linking to other articles -- we took a lot of time to do that, and we appreciate the positive feedback.

Response to Peer Review #1
We have read through and corrected the grammatical errors and typos. Thank you for your close reading and catching them.

We have tried to address the lack of focus and connection to physical organic chemistry in some of the sections. We added concrete examples and showed precisely how given theories or techniques are important in (physical) organic chemistry. Your advice to look at how the organic chemistry page was structured was helpful.

We have added more figures that help to exemplify many of the concepts we discuss. It was not always possible to find a suitable figure or example, but we believe we have definitely focused each topic and tied it back to physical organic chemistry. We agree that adding as many figures and examples as possible is ideal. However, we only have so much time to cover a topic as broad as physical organic chemistry. We believe the figures and examples we added have made a significant improvement to the article. The sections are more focused and relevant to physical organic chemistry.

While there are many references, we believe they are all relevant and useful. They are necessary for the examples that we include. While including less detail would eliminate some of the references, we do not believe that cutting is necessary at this point.

Response to Peer Review #2
A big thank you for the first suggestion -- we did not initially realize technical the introduction was. We tightened it up and removed most of the more scientific terms that were more appropriate later in the article. That has helped to make the introduction more accessible.

We understand your concern that some of the figures were not original (the crown ether and the keto-enol tautomerization). However, we did construct all of the figures in our original Wikipedia article ourselves. The reason that very similar images exist in other Wikipedia pages or in journal articles is because the examples we chose to highlight are very commonly used, or the quintessential example, of a given topic or theory. In order to give a broader view of the scope of physical organic chemistry, and to address the issue of seemingly duplicated pictures, we changed the examples highlighted and added different figures. We believe this has been a positive change in terms of demonstrating concrete examples of current research being conducted in the field of physical organic chemistry and providing more interesting figures and schemes to highlight the article. In the reaction coordinate figure we took your excellent suggestion of adding the ΔG‡ arrow to clearly illustrate the difference in activation energy between the catalyzed and uncatalyzed pathways. This definitely helped to clarify what we were describing in the text. We also slightly changed the drawing for the catalyzed pathway with a change in mechanism.

Response to UMChemProfessor
As discussed above, we have focused the sections and drawn a clear connection between the topics and physical organic chemistry. This has been accomplished through additional figures, schemes, and examples.

We have made many of the figures larger, particularly the schemes and reaction mechanisms. This made them more clear and easier to read without having to click on them. We resized them so that the compounds should appear to be the same size.

As discussed more completely above, we accepted many of the peer reviewers' suggestions. They were vey helpful in improving the article.

Response to ChemLibrarian
We enlarged the pictures as suggested. We also centered a number of them to make them easier to read and to help improve the flow of the article. This also helped to make the text associate directly with the example being shown in the picture. This helped us to use examples to focus the article and connect to physical organic chemistry, as discussed above. Thank you for your help!