Top papers of 2011: recognizing our finest.

Y ou can tweet all day, but it is hard to distinguish the finest tweets among the noise. After all, there are about 50 million tweets in a single day at Twitter. Coincidentally, that just happens to be the total number of journal articles published in the world since 1665 when Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was started So which was the best paper ever written? 50 million is far too many to wrap your brain around, and the breadth of the subject matter is seriously daunting (even for brilliant Editors). has anyone been purported to know everything about everything. " The Ignorance Explosion " holds that each generation grows progressively dumber (J. Lukasiewicz, Leonardo 7:1259−163, 1974). It makes sensewe know a vanishingly small proportion of an exponentially increasing body of knowledge. Fortunately, our problem at ES&T is not quite as trans-computational. Last year we published a large (but finite) number of papers, 1500, from about 4500 submissions. Still, it is difficult to say which ones were the best (or even what " best " means in the sense of scientific publications). Since 2006 we have tried to make that task a little easier by naming our Top Papers of the Year. We ask each of our Associate Editors to nominate a few papers of enduring quality in each category (Environmental Science, Technology, Policy Analysis, and Feature). Then, members of the ES&T Editorial Advisory Board read the approximately 100 nominations and winnow-down the list to the top five or so in each category. I have the Solomon's task of selecting the final Top Papers in each category. This year, I found the Top Policy Analysis papers particularly interesting. Our winner was by Wä ger, Schluep, Mü ller, and Gloor on the content of mixed plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) (dx.doi.org/10.1021/ es202518n). They asked, " How many hazardous substances can be detected in the plastics of WEEE? " The number of toxic metals and flame retardants to be analyzed is largely determined by the Restriction on Use of Hazardous Sub-stancesthe RoHS Directive of the European Commission. Wä ger et al. showed that most all waste plastics in WEEE have at least one hazardous substancemany have multiple hits. If governments want to limit the export and exposure of such hazards, they need to consider the results of this paper. Our first runner-up paper in the Policy Analysis category …