Happy Birthday! Advanced Materials Interfaces Turns Five

Abstract

2018 was a tremendous year for Advanced Materials Interfaces. The Impact Factor further increased from 4.279 (Journal Citation Reports 2017) to 4.834 confirming growing readership and citation. Submissions continue to grow fast, and despite the rejection rate growing too, the number of published articles increased to 450. Founded in 2014, Advanced Materials Interfaces turns five years old this year and has already become a journal that publishes top-level research on interface technologies and effects. Popular topics covered by the journal are depicted in Figure 1. The journal has already attracted many important, highly interdisciplinary contributions from recognized experts from all over the world. An important part of the journal is the Editorial Advisory Board and we are very grateful to all our board members. This year we welcome Prof. Jennifer Rupp (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA), Prof. Sander Leeuwenburgh (Radboud University, The Netherlands) and Prof. Hailin Peng (Peking University, Beijing, China) as new members of the board. The current list of Editorial Advisory Board Members of Advanced Materials Interfaces can be found here. Very sadly on March 27th, one of our prominent board members, Prof. Helmut Möhwald, has died at the age of 72. Helmuth Möhwald published more than 1000 peer-reviewed publications and has been cited more than 50 000 times. In addition to his scientific research, Professor Möhwald was an accomplished teacher: in fact, more than 50 of his former students have taken up professorships in Germany and abroad. Please read here for more information. Furthermore, we are grateful to our authors, reviewers as well as readers who ensure that only the very best articles are finally selected for publication. This year Advanced Materials Interfaces has successfully launched a Hall of Fame (HoF) series of invited-only review articles from the top scientists in the field. A contribution from this series was published in each issue in 2018 and citations to these articles are high and, as can be seen in Table 1, a number of Hall of Fame review articles are among the top-cited articles in 2018. The HoF articles are collected into a special virtual issue online, highlighted on our Advanced Science News service. Some articles have drawn additional attention via news and social media platforms, which is reflected by their high Altmetric score. A selection of articles that had an exceptionally broad impact in media in 2018 is shown in Table 2. Also this year the journal has published many great looking front covers for the issues. A small selection of front covers from 2018 is included at the end of this Editorial. Another highlight in 2018 was the Special Issue on “Self-Healing Materials” by Sander Leeuwenburgh (Technical University Delft, NL) et al. and the Special Section on “Interfacial Engineering of Perovskite Solar Cells for Improved Performance and Stability” by Emmanuel Kymakis (Technological Education Institute of Crete, GR). A number of Special Issues are planned for 2019, including: “Thin Film Oxides”, guest-edited by Nini Pryds (Technical University of Denmark) and Albert Tarancón (IREC, Barcelona, Spain), and “Bottom-Up Self-Assembly”, guest-edited by Massimo Mastrangeli (Technical University Delft, NL) and Michele Perego (CNR, Rome, Italy). From the start of 2018 all journals of the Advanced Family as well the Macromolecular Journals waived the costs for printing colour figures, and now pre-submission to pre-print servers does not preclude publication. No doubt the new year will bring more exciting developments and we look forward to sharing much more exciting interface-related research with you! On behalf of the editorial team,