Review and analysis of safety policies of chemical journals

Advances in chemistry are highly dependent on the procedures published in peer-reviewed journals. Some chemistry journals require authors to address safety considerations in their manuscripts but others do not. In this study, we examined 726 chemistry journals from 28 publishers to determine if they require the author to mention safety precautions. Journals supply information for authors that generally mention safety in two places. In the guidelines for authors, which are widely read by prospective contributors, 8% mention safety. Most journals have ethics guidelines of which 59% mention safety.In order to determine the effectiveness of safety policies 100 articles from each of six journals that published research that involved extensive syntheses were selected. The results of the search indicated that the target compounds were mentioned 107 times but only one mention carried any safety precaution.