Happy birthday Chemical Synthesis!

Our journal is celebrating its first anniversary as the COVID-19 pandemic is gradually easing. During the last year, we organized a strong international editorial team. With the active participation of outstanding young people in China and abroad, the first youth editorial board team composed of 37 enthusiastic and outstanding young researchers was established. In this year, through the efforts of the editorial department, 14 excellent articles were published in the first two inaugural issues. Among them, one original paper contributed by our honorary Editor-in-Chief Professor Krief was praised by Professor Sharpless, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Since the first issue was published in November last year, it has received 13,458 views and 2515 downloads and gained widespread attention around the world! We sincerely thank the editorial staff for their hard work, the quality control of our section editors, and the active participation of our young editorial committee members. Special thanks are given to our authors for their high-quality contributions. I have no words to express my gratitude to our reviewers for their precious time devoted to the evaluation of manuscripts and their professionalism and heart for the sciences for the first, second, and sometimes even third rounds of review. We know that we can continue to count on them. The success of this first year is owing to our authors and reviewers.

In the first issue of 2022, the first news is from the “International Organization for Chemical Development (IOCD)” that Prof. Vivian Wing-Wah Yam from Hongkong University, China, was elected as the IOCD’s new president, the first woman president. She succeeded Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. We congratulate Prof. Yam for her election and wish her a great success. You will find an excellent review article on the circularly polarized luminescence in inorganic materials contributed by Prof. Liu from Shanghai Normal University, China, and Prof. Jin from Kanagawa University, Japan. This review article was selected as Editor’s choice and highlighted as the cover image. One original research article on a very hot topic “Mn-Ce catalysts for highly efficient C-H activation” was contributed jointly by Prof. Wang and Prof. Xiao from Zhejiang University, China, and Prof. Zhang from Jilin University, China. A research highlight made by Prof. Stephane Siffert, our section editor of catalysis, illustrates the high quality of this contribution. This research article is also highlighted by the cover image. Carbon neutral is our main challenge. Hydrogen economy plays a critical role in energy transformation from fossil fuels to green energy. Prof. Yao and his team from Jilin University, China, and Griffith University, Australia, present a review paper on developing efficient hydrogen storage materials and the corresponding methods to successfully realize the “hydrogen economy”.

I sincerely wish that the articles in this issue will bring you the scientific advances you have been waiting for. On this important occasion of the first anniversary of our journal, we look forward to bringing you more chemistry developments, and we wish that you join us to promote together chemical research via our journal and realize our Chemical Synthesis dream.