Page 8 - Advanced Organic Chemistry Part B - Reactions & Synthesis

Acknowledgment

and Personal Statement

The revision and updating of Advanced Organic Chemistry that appears as the Fifth
Edition spanned the period September 2002 through December 2006. Each chapter
was reworked and updated and some reorganization was done, as described in the
Prefaces to Parts A and B. This period began at the point of conversion of library
resources to electronic form. Our university library terminated paper subscriptions to
the journals of the American Chemical Society and other journals that are available
electronically as of the end of 2002. Shortly thereafter, an excavation mishap at an
adjacent construction project led to structural damage and closure of our departmental
library. It remained closed through June 2007, but thanks to the efforts of Carol Hunter,
Beth Blanton-Kent, Christine Wiedman, Robert Burnett, and Wynne Stuart, I was able
to maintain access to a few key print journals including the Journal of the American
Chemical Society, Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organic Letters, Tetrahedron, and
Tetrahedron Letters. These circumstances largely completed an evolution in the source
for specific examples and data. In the earlier editions, these were primarily the result
of direct print encounter or search of printed Chemical Abstracts indices. The current
edition relies mainly on electronic keyword and structure searches. Neither the former
nor the latter method is entirely systematic or comprehensive, so there is a considerable
element of circumstance in the inclusion of specific material. There is no intent that
specific examples reflect either priority of discovery or relative importance. Rather,
they are interesting examples that illustrate the point in question.
Several reviewers provided many helpful corrections and suggestions, collated
by Kenneth Howell and the editorial staff of Springer. Several colleagues provided
valuable contributions. Carl Trindle offered suggestions and material from his course
on computational chemistry. Jim Marshall reviewed and provided helpful comments
on several sections. Michal Sabat, director of the Molecular Structure Laboratory,
provided a number of the graphic images. My co-author, Francis A. Carey, retired
in 2000 to devote his full attention to his text, Organic Chemistry, but continued to
provide valuable comments and insights during the preparation of this edition. Various
users of prior editions have provided error lists, and, hopefully, these corrections have
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