The achemso package has provided the standard
BibTeX styles following the American Chemical Society (ACS) guidelines since
before I started using LaTeX. I’ve looked after achemso since 2008, and took
it from a simple BibTeX .bst to a bundle including submission class, a demo
document and other goodies.
I started the class many years ago, and with hindsight some of it was not such
a great plan. More importantly, the ACS have never used LaTeX in production,
which has always meant that using a dedicated class was a bit awkward: getting
things into a specific class only for them to strip that out again. I’ve
therefore recently agreed with the ACS to move from a dedicated class to a
simple template, now available on
GitHub and soon to appear on the
ACS website. Authors can then simply use article with minor adjustments and
get something that is suitable for production.
At the same time, classical BibTeX styles, whilst still widely used, are
better replaced by biblatex methods.
That opens up a lot of flexibility to the user, and avoids needing add-on
packages to provide control or compound citations.
So I’m marking achemso as for historical support only, and recommending all
new content shifts to updated approaches. I’ll keep achemso working of
course: not that there should be much to do! But it’s time for people to move
away from what was a rather rigid approach in new documents.