Dear Colleagues,

This is to let you know that AIChE Journal has posted the first part of 
the Virtual Issue on Process Systems Engineering:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1547-5905/homepage/pse_virtual_issue.htm

The virtual issue on Process Systems Engineering includes the top 210 
cited papers that have been published in the area of Process Systems 
Engineering at the AIChE Journal since its inception. All papers except 
two have 46 or more citations, and they belong to the 1,500 top papers 
of AIChE Journal in terms of number of citations.

While the number of citations is not always equivalent to high quality 
papers or their positive impact in an area, it is a simple and 
unambiguous measure that attempts to establish the potential impact that 
a technical article may have had. We have decided to put together this 
virtual issue with two major goals in mind. On the one hand it is an 
interesting exercise to display those articles in PSE that presumably 
have had a large impact. On the other hand it is useful to gain some 
insights into the historical trends of PSE-related research subjects 
over the last 55 years.  We of course acknowledge the fact that highly 
cited papers that have had a high impact in PSE have been published in 
other journals such as Computers and Chemical Engineering, Industrial 
Engineering Chemistry Research and Chemical Engineering Science. In that 
sense one should keep in  mind that this virtual issue only provides a 
partial view of PSE, which has become a strong and broad core area of 
chemical engineering.

The 210 papers of the virtual issue have been organized into the 
following four parts, with the citation count shown below:

Part-A:  Process Modeling, Simulation and Optimization.
Part-B:  Process Synthesis and Design.
Part-C:  Process Identification, State Estimation and Control
Part-D:  Process Operations: Optimization, Monitoring, and Fault Diagnosis

     No. of papers    Citations    Citations/paper
Part-A    57        6,275        110
Part-B    52        4,234        81
Part-C    61        4,395        72
Part-D    40        4,141        104

We hope that this virtual issue will bring not only fond memories to the 
senior researchers in the PSE area, but that it will help to inspire the 
young generation of researchers in PSE.

Ignacio E. Grossmann and George Stephanopoulos
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