The journal’s primary audience is the community of theoretical and computational chemists, a community that transcends all the boundaries between chemistry’s traditional subfields, e.g., analytical, biochemical, organic, inorganic, and physical. However, the journal is also used by experimentalists who are seeking to exploit computational approaches in their work or who are seeking to build on knowledge from computational investigations.

The journal’s growing impact appears to be a result of three factors. First is the rapid growth of computational chemistry in solving genuine problems confronting chemists, molecular biologists, and biophysicists. Successful commercialization of computational chemistry codes is another signpost of this rapid growth, and in turn, that has raised the importance in both industrial and academic labs of a journal providing assessments of existing and emerging methods. The second factor is a determined effort by the editors to slowly and continuously raise standards for significance and impact. This is likely the reason for the most recent swell in the journal’s citation rate. With standards that have evolved, the point has been reached where reporting routine calculational work that can be rather easily carried out in many laboratories is excluded unless there happens to be very unexpected results, and then only if these are presented with important insight and/or new physical understanding. The third factor is electronic processing, which can be very rapid via Elsevier’s web submission system. This appears to be shifting somewhat the choice making of investigators toward THEOCHEM over other journals, and the resultant author-attention has also played a role in the increasing citations for journal articles.

The future of the journal is very much dependent on adjusting and adapting to the changing face of computational and theoretical chemistry. Not tied to large instrumentation set-ups, theoreticians are known for making very rapid changes in the way they study problems and even in the very types of problems they study. As well, the greater and greater availability of computing power around the world has led to applications of computational chemistry touching more and more areas, those now ranging from biodynamics to materials science. THEOCHEM tries to set the pace and tone for journal reporting as the field of theoretical chemistry continues to reshape itself. An important challenge for the editorial process is to make adjustments in ways that do not suddenly exclude topical areas that are no longer the most novel, but are still yielding important developments. The editors of THEOCHEM and the Editorial Advisory Board are keenly aware of this challenge and are fervently working to adjust in optimal steps to the rapid changes in the field. And, that best expresses our direction for the future.