International Tables for Crystallography

International Tables for Crystallography
Title	International Tables for Crystallography
Publisher	International Union of Crystallography
First	1935
Latest	2016 (volumes updated)
Language	English

Contents

International Tables for Crystallography is a comprehensive reference series of volumes that codify symmetry, space groups, crystallographic conventions, and computational data crucial to structural science. The series is maintained under the auspices of the International Union of Crystallography and is widely cited by practitioners affiliated with institutions such as the Royal Institution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Cambridge, Max Planck Society and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Editors and contributors include figures associated with the Royal Society, American Crystallographic Association, European Crystallographic Committee, Joint Committee on Powder Diffraction Standards and national laboratories like Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Overview and History

The genesis of the series traces to collaborations among researchers connected to the Royal Society of London, British Association for the Advancement of Science, and early 20th-century crystallographers influenced by work at the University of Manchester, University of Oxford, University of Vienna and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Key historical contributors have affiliations with names such as William Henry Bragg, William Lawrence Bragg, Max von Laue, Paul Ewald and later figures linked to the International Council for Science and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Editions were shaped by meetings held in venues like Cambridge, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva and Stockholm, and by institutions including the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the Franz Schubert Institute. Milestones occurred alongside developments at the CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and with input from committees like the International Standards Organization and the British Standards Institution.

The series is organized into multiple volumes covering space-group symmetry, mathematical tables, diffraction methods, and specialized topics, with contributors from the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Princeton University, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Volumes include data on the 230 space groups used widely by researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Diamond Light Source, Swiss Light Source, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Argonne National Laboratory. Chapters reference methodologies associated with scientists from Louis Pasteur Institute, Pasteur Institute of Lille, Institut Laue–Langevin and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The structural taxonomy is comparable to authoritative compilations emanating from the Smithsonian Institution and curated by editorial boards similar to those of the Nature Publishing Group and Oxford University Press.

The volumes define conventions for coordinate systems, symmetry operations, cell settings and notation adopted by practitioners at the International Organization for Standardization, European Committee for Standardization, American National Standards Institute and national metrology institutes like the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt and National Metrology Institute of Japan. Notational standards intersect with historical contributions from researchers at University College London, ETH Zurich, Ecole Normale Supérieure and the University of Göttingen. These conventions are used in experimental programs at facilities such as ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Neutron Spallation Source, SPring-8 and the Photon Factory and inform software development by teams from IBM Research, Microsoft Research, Google Research and companies like Bruker and Rigaku.

Researchers in structural biology at institutions like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Scripps Research Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry rely on the tables for macromolecular crystallography workflows used in labs collaborating with Pfizer, Roche, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. Materials scientists at MIT, California Institute of Technology, National Institute of Materials Science and Tokyo Institute of Technology apply space-group data to studies involving facilities such as National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The volumes inform electron microscopy projects at the Ernst Ruska-Centre, John Innes Centre collaborations, and planetary science missions of the European Space Agency, NASA, and JAXA where mineral crystallography references intersect with analytical pipelines at the Smithsonian Institution and the Natural History Museum, London.

Editorial governance is overseen by committees drawing membership from the International Union of Crystallography, American Crystallographic Association, European Crystallographic Association and national academies including the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Successive editions have resulted from conferences held in cities like Edinburgh, Prague, Milan, Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing with contributors associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academia Sinica and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Editors coordinate peer review with journal editorial boards such as those of Acta Crystallographica, Journal of Applied Crystallography, Nature Communications and Science, ensuring consistency with standards endorsed by agencies like the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

Digital incarnations and databases derived from the series are integrated into software suites developed by groups at Uppsala University, University of Basel, University of Geneva, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and commercial vendors including Schrödinger, CCP4, Phenix and Materials Studio. Online resources interoperate with repositories like the Protein Data Bank, Inorganic Crystal Structure Database, Crystallography Open Database, European Nucleotide Archive and infrastructures supported by the European Grid Infrastructure and XSEDE. Collaborative projects involve teams from ETH Zurich, University of California, Berkeley, Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University and Peking University to deliver machine-readable symmetry data used in pipelines at Google DeepMind research collaborations, high-performance computing centers such as NERSC, HPC Wales and national supercomputing centers in France, Germany and Japan.