Ionic Liquids (ILs), formerly known as molten salts, constitute one of the hottest areas in chemistry these days. Composed entirely of ions, these room-temperature liquids—with a melting temperature of below 100 degrees C—are fluid, easy to handle, and often colorless. Much of the interest in ILs is based on their promise as "green" substitutes for traditional industrial solvents, in particular volatile organic compounds or VOCs, a major source of industrial pollutants. ILs have no measurable vapor pressure and so greatly reduce the risk associated with traditional solvents.

The hot paper lists for ILs, over the past decade and the past two years, are dominated by reviews covering the application of room-temperature ILs as solvents for synthesis and catalysis, their use in electrochemical devices, their future applications in green chemistry, and even their history. Other hot papers discuss the solvent properties of ILs, the behavior of enzyme-catalyzed processes in ILs, and the combination of ILs with supercritical carbon dioxide. The hottest papers of the last two years have also come to include those describing aryl halide coupling reactions in ILs, their use in catalyst recycling, and the behavioral and electrochemical properties of novel ILs.

Methodology

To construct this database, papers were extracted based on title- and author-supplied keywords for Ionic Liquids. The keywords used were as follows: 

ionic liquid*

The baseline time span for this database is 1994-2004 (first bimonthly). The resulting database contained 2,165 (10 years) and  1,288 (2 years) papers; 3,342 authors; 57 countries; 290 journals; and 745 institutions. 

Rankings

Once the database was in place, it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers (two- and ten-year periods), authors, journals, institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1994-2004 (first bimonthly).

The top 20 papers are ranked according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper were as follows: 15, 18, 7, and 14, respectively. These thresholds correspond to the top 1% of authors, 10% of institutions, 50% of countries and 10% of journals by total papers.

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