Polymer Testing 6 (1986) 241-242

Editorial

Nobody would be surprised that the variety of subjects covered in Polymer Testing over the last six years has been considerable. Neither is it a surprise that some subjects keep cropping up: impact tests, for example, are very frequently carried out for quality control and have attracted much attention for obtaining performance data, so that papers covering new test equipment and techniques are to be expected. Other very commonly used tests--hardness, tensile pro- perties, e tc . - - , even although long established, have inevitably attracted further investigation and the results have found their way on to these pages.

Scanning back over the contents you find the range is such that even some most unexpected subjects have turned up. I would not have expected odour permeability prediction or detection of organic anions in latex to be included. The journal can hardly be accused of not having catholic tastes with tracer techniques for residence time distribution, birefringence to detect orientation, EMI shielding evaluation, failure detection in pressurised pipes, and tests for artificial sports surfaces having all been given an airing.

It would be most unlikely for the distribution of subjects to correlate totally with the popularity of tests. In any case, and whilst on statistics, the 125 papers published to date are only a fraction of the total testing li terature--although forming, we believe, a sig- nificant and valuable contribution--and the bias due to the particular interests and expertise of our authors is doubtless quite marked.

Perhaps there is a case for arguing that one should expect more correlation between the subject matter we publish and the tests of tomorrow because they reflect the areas where effort is currently being put into development. If we did apply that thinking to our titles I am not at all sure what manner of unlikely or even depressing conclusions we would come up with. I would certainly not care to predict too accurately the techniques which will greatly increase in frequency of use, other than one fairly safe bet, i.e. stress relaxation of rubbers; this has been the subject of several papers and I suspect its application will become much more widespread than at present.

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Polymer Testing (6) (1986)---~ Elsevier Applied Science Publishers Ltd, England, 1986. Printed in Northern Ireland

242 Editorial

Alternatively, one could look at what has been left out to see if there are any glaring omissions. There has perhaps been less on processability testing than the general level of interest in that subject would indicate but it was not immediately obvious that any develop- ing test technique was not represented until it clicked that the proportion of papers concerned with chemical analysis was very small indeed. There must be some artificial reason--perhaps the chemists do not know of the journal so please show your analyst friends a copy!

The other area of omission, and do not read too much into this, is any topic I discuss in an editorial, or to be more correct, the peripheral subjects to testing---education of test technicians, the commercial and other advantages of automation, accreditation, calibration, and so on. These are all important topics to the testing laboratory, so perhaps laboratory managers, supervisors, etc., might consider a contribution.

R. Brown