Article

Cite This: J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816 pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc

Writing a Review Article: A Graduate Level Writing Class

Omotola O. Ogunsolu,† Jamie C. Wang,‡ and Kenneth Hanson*,†,‡
†
Materials Science and Engineering, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, United States
‡
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32304, United States
*
S Supporting Information

ABSTRACT: Despite the importance of scientific writing in a

Downloaded via ESCUELA SUPER POLITECNICA D LITORAL on February 12, 2022 at 15:25:17 (UTC).

chemists’ professional career, their development as scientific

See https://pubs.acs.org/sharingguidelines for options on how to legitimately share published articles.

writers is often neglected in undergraduate and graduate curricula.

Among the courses that do encourage students to generate written
documents like proposals, lab reports, or essays, the scientific
community rarely benefits from the resulting product. Here, we
introduce an alternative graduate level writing class where the goal
is for the students to generate a review article that is submitted for
publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This course structure
allows students to build scientific reading and writing skills, learn
about a new topic, and also enhance their resume with an
additional publication and subsequent citations. Concurrently, the
scientific community benefits from an additional resource. What
follows is an outline of the review article writing course as well as
the students’ feedback of the course and writing experience. Overall, the students felt the course was a lot of work. Yet, they also
reported a greater understanding of the topic, a broadened knowledge base, and a better ability to quickly read and process
literature. Despite the challengeswhich included compiling all of the papers for a given topic and managing the time to read
and writethe students gained a new found appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into writing a review article, and they
unanimously felt the results were commensurate with the work.
KEYWORDS: Graduate Education/Research, Curriculum, Communication/Writing, Professional Development

■ INTRODUCTION
Scientific writing is a crucial part of a chemist’s professional
career whether it is in academia, industry, or the government
sector. Chemists in each of these areas are required to regularly
write proposals, reports, patent disclosures, manuscripts,
journal peer reviews, and more. Despite the critical need for
scientific reading and writing skills, an aspiring chemist’s
development as a scientific writer is often neglected in
undergraduate and graduate curricula. For example, a majority
of undergraduate students have minimal writing experience
beyond standard lab reports.1 The demand for technical writing
increases in graduate school due to prospectus, qualifying exam,
and thesis requirements. However, many graduate students do
not begin writing up their research results for publication until
the third or fourth year of their degree program. A number of
strategies have been proposed and implemented to improve
chemistry students’ writing experience including creative
writing assignments,2−4 literature readings followed by essay
writing, 5−7 student peer review, 8,9 capstone writing
courses,10−13 lab reports,14−18 workshops,19 and proposal
writing courses.1,11,20
A missed opportunity in chemistry reading and writing
development is that students spend a considerable amount of
time and effort generating a product that is largely ignored or
forgotten once the project concludes. To put this in context, if
© 2018 American Chemical Society and
Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
five students enroll in a 15 week, 3 credit course and spend 3 h
of out-of-class work time each week, they will collectively
accumulate ∼450 h of time spent on the course. While this
effort is important for students’ personal and professional
development, and it could even result in a fellowship,1 the
scientific community does not immediately benefit.
To counteract this shortcoming, we recently embarked on a
new graduate level writing course where the end goal was for
students to write and publish a review article. The product of
this course, a 46 page review article, containing 467 references,
was published in Chemical Society Reviews.21 This task lent itself
nicely to learning and practicing many aspects of the scientific
writing and peer-review process, including
(1) becoming proficient at searching literature and compiling
relevant references
(2) narrowing down key content from a large body of
literature
(3) developing table and figure design skills and strategies
(4) gaining experience with the writing, submission, and
revision process associated with peer-reviewed publica-
tions
Received: November 2, 2017
Revised: March 11, 2018
Published: March 30, 2018
810 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education
(5) publishing a peer-reviewed article
In addition to learning about a new topic and professional
skill development, the students benefited from resume building
with an additional publication and subsequent citations, and the
scientific community benefited from an additional reference
compiling and critically reviewing the current literature in a
given field. Herein, we outline the course content and the
student’s perceptions of the course and writing experience.
■ COURSE DESCRIPTION
In Spring 2016, the 15 week class was listed as a Department of
Chemistry & Biochemistry special topics course (pass or fail
grading). It was scheduled to meet every Monday from 9am to
noon and was open for enrollment by any graduate student at
Florida State University. The total class enrollment included
five students who were primarily in their second or third year of
graduate school. Three graduate students were from the
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, one from the
Materials Science & Engineering program, and one was a
postdoc auditing the course.
Several decisions regarding the logistics of writing a review
article were made prior to the start of the course. The first
involved the general focus of the review article, which was
multimolecular assembly on metal oxide surfaces. This was
decided early as the corresponding author, the instructor (one
of us, K.H.), must have expertise in the chosen review article
field. This expertise is important for guiding the outlining and
revision stages of the writing process. It is also a criteria
reviewers are asked to consider when evaluating a review article
submission. All of the students enrolled in the course had
research experience with molecular photophysics, energy
transfer, electron transfer, and generating and characterizing
solar cells, which are topics discussed in the review article. With
that said, aside from the general introduction into these areas,
only ∼10% of the content in the final review article was directly
related to the students research projects, with 3 of the 5
students covering topics they had not researched before.
The second major decision was selecting a student leader for
the project. There are many aspects of the writing process that
cannot be performed as a group, so one student, who would
also become the first author (one of us, J.C.W.), was designated
as responsible for compiling the individual contributions,
formatting the document, and formatting references. This
student could have been chosen by several different strategies
like voting or volunteering, but in this case, she was selected by
the instructor because her research was directly related to the
subject matter and she was reliably timely with tasks.
The course outline is depicted in Figure 1 with week-by-week
descriptions provided below.
Week 1. Course Goals, First Assignment
The instructor (one of us, K.H.) introduced the theme of the
review article and discussed a general outline for the class and
writing process on the first half of the first day of class (Figure
1). Then the first task was assigned: compile every review
article on the general theme that has been published during the
last 15−20 years. The assignment was supplemented by an
overview of literature searching engines like SciFinder and
Google Scholar. While these search engines generally explore
the same journals, their unique algorithms can yield different
results even for the same keywords like “dye semiconductor
review” and are helpful in maximizing search efficacy. Strategies
for finding review articles via citing and cited references were
811
Article
Figure 1. Flowchart depicting the course timeline and content.
also discussed, and an introduction was given to the most
common and highest impact journals that publish review
articles (e.g., Chemical Reviews, Chemical Society Reviews,
Coordination Chemistry Reviews, Accounts of Chemical Research).
In addition to assigning a general search for keywords such as
self-assembly, metal oxides, and dye-sensitized accompanied by
the word review, these journals were partitioned between
students to minimize effort overlap. During the subsequent
week, students compiled articles in a shared cloud storage
folder; in our case, we used DropBox, using a common naming
scheme (First Author_Year_Journal_Subject) to prevent
duplication.
Week 2. View and Partition Review Articles, Second
Assignment
During the second class meeting, the students looked through
the list of compiled review articles, 117 total, and sorted them
by general theme. The review articles were then partitioned
among the students in preparation for the second assignment:
to generate a single presentation slide for each assigned article.
The summary slide was to include (1) the article’s publication
year, title, and authors, (2) a bullet point list highlighting the
major topics covered in the review, and (3) a figure from the
review that succinctly summarizes its overarching theme. An
example of the summary slide can be seen in Figure 2.22
Weeks 3−5. Summary Slide Presentations
During week three and a portion of week four, the students
presented their summary slides. The presentations increased
the students’ familiarity with the available literature and
facilitated the identification of any deficiencies in the published
reviews. It quickly became clear that some articles were directly
relevant, and others were only tangentially related.
The remaining portion of the week four class period was
dedicated to a brainstorming session that involved listing any
aspect of multimolecular assembly on metal oxide surfaces that
would be appropriate to cover in a review article like assembly
methods, intermolecular energy transfer, and aggregation.
While referencing the list, all content that was sufficiently
covered in previous reviewsfor example, chromophore−
catalyst assembly strategies23 or theoretical modeling of
chromophores at interfaces24were removed. The remaining
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education
Figure 2. Example of a summary slide of a previously published review
article. Slide figures are reprinted with permission from ref 22.
Copyright 2004 Elsevier.
content was then grouped into topic and subtopics. Decisions
regarding topic areas were open to debate as it would play a
major role in shaping the content and flow of the review article.
The discussion primarily focused on deciding between
partitioning the topics by assembly methods like co-deposition
and metal-ion linkages or by phenomena like electron transfer
and energy transfer. Ultimately, the class decided on the latter
because each phenomena would require an introduction and
would be easier to explain all at once.
Once compiled, the topics and subtopics were organized on a
whiteboard to generate the first full review article outline. Based
on the scope of this outline, the title of the article was discussed
and drafted. As an aside, this outline was then submitted to
Chemical Society Reviews as required for their screening
procedure prior to accepting full submissions (vide infra).
The students then negotiated who would be responsible for
each subtopic, usually by expertise and interest, until all were
accounted for (2 or 3 per student). The students then compiled
every relevant paper they could find for their given subtopic.
The shared manuscript archive was reorganized per the outline,
and a folder for each topic and subtopic was created. This
allowed for the easy sharing of references with overlapping
subject matter. Students were then asked to prepare, over 2
Figure 3. Example of a first draft of an outline from (a) whiteboard to (b) word processor version.
812
Article
weeks, ∼10−20 summary slides for the earliest, most
interesting, and most unique papers for each subtopic.
Weeks 6−8. Literature Presentations and Outlines
In weeks 6−8, students presented a portion of their references
for their first subtopics. The presentations shared notable
results from key references and started to note common
measurements and experimental observations among the
collective. Following the presentations, students scheduled
one-on-one meetings with the instructor to begin outlining
their section of the review. The general outlining strategy
focused on these tasks:
(1) Introduce the conceptual foundation of the subtopic
(2) Note some of the earliest examples
(3) Share general observations among all the references
(4) Discuss some unique references in greater detail
(5) Describe current limitations and future prospects.
An example of one of these rough outlines is shown in Figure
3a. Each outline was presented to the class (Figure 3b) to
receive suggestions and constructive feedback via peer review.
Weeks 9 and 10. Individual Writing
Once the first round of presentations, rough outlines, and
outline revisions were complete, the focus of the course shifted
to individual writing. During this time, students began
expanding the outline into paragraphs of text that summarize
the important information for each bullet point. To avoid any
formatting or compiling issues that can arise with reference
formatting software, each student noted the references for their
sections by including the web address for the relevant citation,
within brackets (i.e., [http://www.___.com]), at the appro-
priate location in the text. The class still met during regular
class periods, which allowed each student to share their
progress on the text, equations, figures, and tables they were
generating. These presentations served two purposes: (1) for
students to offer feedback and suggestions to the author and
(2) to provide intermittent deadlines that encouraged students
to make progress on their portion of the project.
During the presentations, the students also began suggesting
figures to include, be it directly from literature or in new figures
that summarized larger concepts. Usually, the new figures were
hand-drawn sketches on paper or a whiteboard that were used
as a placeholder until publication quality figures were generated
(vide infra). Students also shared spreadsheets that were
intended to convey and compare large amounts of data in a
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education
Figure 4. Example of a table (a) rough draft containing all the data and the (b) truncated, submitted table. Panel b was reprinted with permission
from ref 21. Copyright 2018 Royal Society of Chemistry.
Figure 5. Figure progression through (a) hand drawn, (b) digital draft, and (c) final figure. Panel c was reprinted with permission from ref 21.
Copyright 2018 Royal Society of Chemistry.
concise way. As depicted in Figure 4a, the first drafts often
contained dozens of columns and rows for all the data that
might be relevant to a particular measurement. The students
then discussed which columns and examples were most
relevant and revised the tables to only include the data that
were useful in emphasizing the general trends and conclusions
(Figure 4b).
After the first drafts of each section were complete, they were
transferred to the instructor for comments and revisions. The
edited text was then sent back to the student for further
revisions and updates.
Weeks 11−14. Repeat
When one subsection was completed, the process described
above for weeks 6−10 was repeated for another subsection. By
the end of this period, solid drafts for most review article
subsections were completed.
813
Article
Week 15 and Beyond. Compiling, Editing, and Revising
While a bulk of the content was generated, the entirety of the
review article was not completed within the 15 week semester.
Yet, since each student was heavily involved in the project and
made major contributions, each received a passing grade for the
course.
Given that the class goal was to publish a review article, the
students were willing to continue working on the project even
after the semester concluded. During the ∼5 weeks following
the end of the course, the class no longer met as a group, but
each student continued their individual writing process.
Subsequently, drafts of each subsection were compiled into a
single document by the student leader (one of us, J.C.W.). The
instructor and student leader then generated introductions for
each topic as well as an overall introduction for the review
article. Up until this point, the compiled draft contained only
bracketed web addresses for the references. The student leader
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education
then began uploading the cited papers into the Endnote
software package and then inserted the appropriately formatted
references from Endnote into the manuscript.
For figures taken directly from literature, the students were
required to obtain the appropriate reproduction permissions
from the respective journals. The new figures generated by the
class underwent a general progression from a hand drawn
image (Figure 5a), to a digital draft (Figure 5b), and finally to a
publication quality figure (Figure 5c). The latter step required a
high degree of collaboration between all authors to keep a
consistent theme and design aesthetic. The images in Figure
5b,c, for example, were generated using a combination of Chem
Draw and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Submission, Revision, and Acceptance
Unlike research-based manuscript submissions, many of the
journals that exclusively publish review articles require authors
to pass a preliminary screening before the full submission is
recommended. During this screening phase, authors are
required to submit a document that introduces the topic,
describes the importance of the field, lists communities that
may be interested, and includes a general outline of the review
with important references cited. Around week 5 or 6 of the
course, this document was drafted by the instructor, based on
the outline generated during the class, and first draft was shared
with students to incorporate their comments/revisions as well
as to add important references from each of their sections.
Once the target journal for the full review article was
established, the final version of the manuscript began taking
shape.
In accord with Chemical Society Reviews formatting, students
were required to generate short biographies and take photos
which were then incorporated into the manuscript by the first
author. The first author (one of us, J.C.W.) was also responsible
for addressing journal-specific formatting requirements and
sending a final draft to her fellow students and the instructor for
final revisions. The students decided authorship order (other
than first and corresponding authors) according to the size (i.e.,
percentage of the final documents total area) of each student’s
contribution to the final manuscript. Each student was also
required to suggest a reviewer that was appropriate for their
given topic area primarily based on which authors were
mentioned several times in a given section. A cover letter for
the submission was then written by the instructor (one of us,
K.H.) and shared with the students for review. When final
drafts of both the manuscript and cover letter were approved by
all authors, the first author submitted them to the journal.
Following several weeks under review, the editor’s decision
and reviewer comments were shared with the students. The
class reconvened to partition the requested changes according
to the author of the given subtopic. The revisions were
compiled by the student leader (one of us, J.C.W.) and a reply
to reviewers composed with the help of the instructor. The first
author also made a point to address all editorial requests like
fixing formatting mistakes and updating references. Upon
completion, the revised manuscript and reply to reviewers
document were circulated to the class for approval before
submission.
Once accepted and proofs were received, each student was
required to proof-read the entire manuscript, document any
mistakes, and share revisions with the student leader. After
compiling all of the revisions and removing all duplicates, the
changes were then submitted to the editor and the final
814
Article
manuscript was published.21 A celebration for the entire class
quickly followed.
■ COURSE ASSESSMENT
Given the limited number of students, it is difficult to
objectively quantify success metrics for the course. However,
a survey was given to qualitatively assess the students’
experiences in the course. The 20 question survey as well as
the answers from all five of the students are provided in
Supporting Information with general observations noted below.
One of the most common themes throughout the responses
was that the students learned a lot about the review article’s
subject matter and most enjoyed learning topics outside of their
direct expertise. They found the literature review aspect
particularly useful in that it improved their ability to read
through literature quickly and find key points. Reading through
the large body of work also encouraged the students to rethink
their own writing strategies in an effort to convey their message
as quickly and clearly as possible. They expressed more
appreciation for well-written papers and expressed a desire to
recognize and emulate them. Along a similar vein, for those
students that generated figures, the process made them
appreciate quality figures and reconsider strategies for
generating their own. Some students thought the project was
highly collaborative via sharing papers, compiling content, and
generating figures, while others did not, depending on their
subtopics relation to others.
In terms of what the students thought could be improved,
the students recommended more hard deadlines, outlining
subtopics earlier to help maintain focus, and to finish subtopic
at a time in order to avoid re-reviewing content.
Finally, all who took the class said they would recommend it
to others and would provide the following advice to anyone
considering taking it:
• “I think anyone who wants to commit to scientific
writing should be taking this course.”
• “Be ready to read over 100 research articles. Start with
those topics that you may be more familiar with to
practice summarizing so that you will be more efficient
on other articles.”
• “Make sure to start all of the assignments early.
Compiling data and thinking about the best way to
organize it together takes a lot of time.”
• “Find a way to keep track of references and what key
information is in each one or you will need to re-read
them several times.”
• “This is a course that requires a lot of effort and hard
work, so be prepared.”
The most commonly expressed challenges students shared
during the course included (1) compiling all of the papers for a
given topic, (2) finding ways to organize large bodies of
information, and (3) finding the time necessary to read and
write for the class. Despite the challenges, all of the work gave
the students a new-found appreciation for the amount of effort
that goes into writing a review article and they unanimously felt
the results were commensurate with the work.
In terms of the instructors response to the course, he (one of
us, K.H.) found it useful to write a review article in a course-
based format. In contrast to an informal writing process that are
often only completed as a submission deadline approaches, the
class required regular meeting times that quickly facilitated the
writing process. The instructor agreed with the students that
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education
the course was a lot of time and effort. but he also benefited
from learning more about the subject and publishing a paper. In
the future, the instructor will take the students’ advice and
implement more hard deadlines as well as help outline content
earlier in the writing process. He is also interested by the
possibility of using the first day of class to collectively decide
the topic for the review article.
■
CONCLUSION
Here, we have introduced a new graduate level course intended
to develop students’ scientific reading and writing skills through
the process of writing and publishing a review article. The
writing process consisted of several steps:
(1) Compiling and presenting previous review articles
(2) Listing under-covered topics
(3) Partitioning the subtopics among the students
(4) Compiling and presenting important papers for each
subtopic
(5) Outlining, writing, and revising each section
(6) Compiling the final document
(7) Submitting, revising, and acceptance
Per their survey responses, it was clear that the students felt
the course was a lot of work. Yet, the experience helped
improve their understanding of the topic, broadened their
knowledge base, and honed their ability to quickly read through
and process literature. By way of the reading and writing
process, they noted an increased awareness of high-quality
publications and now strive to write in such a manner. They
also offered advice for improving the course and suggestions for
students considering enrolling in a similar course. Overall, it is
safe to say that both the students and instructor found the class
to be a rewarding experience and, as noted by one student, “it
feels great to have been a part of something big.”
■
ASSOCIATED CONTENT
*
S Supporting Information
The Supporting Information is available on the ACS
Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838.
Survey questions and answers (PDF, DOCX)
■
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail: hanson@chem.fsu.edu.
ORCID
Omotola O. Ogunsolu: 0000-0002-9446-3027
Jamie C. Wang: 0000-0002-6531-1040
Kenneth Hanson: 0000-0001-7219-7808
Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
■
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially supported by the Army Research Office
under Grant No. W911NF-14-1-0660 and the National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No.
DGE-1449440.
■
REFERENCES
(1) McCarthy, B. D.; Dempsey, J. L. Cultivating Advanced Technical
Writing Skills through a Graduate-Level Course on Writing Research
Proposals. J. Chem. Educ. 2017, 94, 696−702.
815
Article
(2) Alber, M. Creative Writing and Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 2001,
78, 478−480.
(3) Carlisle, E. F.; Kinsinger, J. B. Scientific writing. A humanistic and
scientific course for science undergraduates. J. Chem. Educ. 1977, 54,
632−634.
(4) Henary, M.; Owens, E. A.; Tawney, J. G. Creative Report Writing
in Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Laboratory Inspires Nonmajors.
J. Chem. Educ. 2015, 92, 90−95.
(5) Beall, H. Literature Reading and Out-of-Class Essay Writing in
General Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 10−11.
(6) Sherwood, D. W.; Kovac, J. Writing in Chemistry: An Effective
Learning Tool. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 1399−1403.
(7) Rossi, F. M. Writing in an Advanced Undergraduate Chemistry
Course: An Assignment Exploring the Development of Scientific
Ideas. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 395−396.
(8) Nicotera, C. L.; Shibley, I. A.; Milakofsky, L. K. Incorporating a
Substantial Writing Assignment into Organic Chemistry: Library
Research, Peer Review, and Assessment. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 50−
53.
(9) Rangachari, P. K. Teaching undergraduates the process of peer
review: learning by doing. Adv. Physiol. Educ. 2010, 34, 137−144.
(10) Schepmann, H. G.; Hughes, L. A. Chemical Research Writing: A
Preparatory Course for Student Capstone Research. J. Chem. Educ.
2006, 83, 1024−1028.
(11) Hunter, A. D. A Capstone Writing Experience in Polymer
Chemistry: Writing a Proposal for an Instrument Purchase. J. Chem.
Educ. 1998, 75, 1424.
(12) Stewart, A. F.; Williams, A. L.; Lofgreen, J. E.; Edgar, L. J. G.;
Hoch, L. B.; Dicks, A. P. Chemistry Writing Instruction and Training:
Implementing a Comprehensive Approach to Improving Student
Communication Skills. J. Chem. Educ. 2016, 93, 86−92.
(13) Wallner, A. S.; Latosi-Sawin, E. Technical Writing and
Communication in a Senior-Level Seminar. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76,
1404−1406.
(14) Bressette, A. R.; Breton, G. W. Using Writing to Enhance the
Undergraduate Research Experience. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 1626−
1627.
(15) Van Bramer, S. E.; Bastin, L. D. Using a Progressive Paper To
Develop Students’ Writing Skills. J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 745−750.
(16) Whelan, R. J.; Zare, R. N. Teaching Effective Communication in
a Writing-Intensive Analytical Chemistry Course. J. Chem. Educ. 2003,
80, 904−906.
(17) Goodman, W. D.; Bean, J. C. A chemistry laboratory project to
develop thinking and writing skills. J. Chem. Educ. 1983, 60, 483−485.
(18) Tilstra, L. Using Journal Articles to Teach Writing Skills for
Laboratory Reports in General Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78,
762−764.
(19) Bruce, M. L.; Coffer, P. K.; Rees, S.; Robson, J. M. Write on the
edge: using a chemistry corpus to develop academic writing skills
resources for undergraduate chemists. Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. 2016, 17,
580−589.
(20) Cole, K. E.; Inada, M.; Smith, A. M.; Haaf, M. P. Implementing
a Grant Proposal Writing Exercise in Undergraduate Science Courses
To Incorporate Real-World Applications and Critical Analysis of
Current Literature. J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 1316−1319.
(21) Wang, J. C.; Hill, S. P.; Dilbeck, T.; Ogunsolu, O. O.; Banerjee,
T.; Hanson, K. Multimolecular assemblies on high surface area metal
oxides and their role in interfacial energy and electron transfer. Chem.
Soc. Rev. 2018, 47, 104−148.
(22) Argazzi, R.; Murakami Iha, N. Y.; Zabri, H.; Odobel, F.;
Bignozzi, C. A. Design of molecular dyes for application in
photoelectrochemical and electrochromic devices based on nano-
crystalline metal oxide semiconductors. Coord. Chem. Rev. 2004, 248,
1299−1316.
(23) Ashford, D. L.; Gish, M. K.; Vannucci, A. K.; Brennaman, M. K.;
Templeton, J. L.; Papanikolas, J. M.; Meyer, T. J. Molecular
Chromophore−Catalyst Assemblies for Solar Fuel Applications.
Chem. Rev. 2015, 115, 13006−13049.
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838
J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816
Journal of Chemical Education Article

(24) Pastore, M.; Etienne, T.; De Angelis, F. Structural and electronic

properties of dye-sensitized TiO2 for solar cell applications: from
single molecules to self-assembled monolayers. J. Mater. Chem. C
2016, 4, 4346−4373.

816 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00838

J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95, 810−816