Opening the Doors to Advanced Materials in 2022.

Abstract

Welcome to the 34th volume of Advanced Materials and the first issue of 2022. We're happy to be looking back at a successful year for the journal. Thanks to our authors and reviewers who help us to ensure that only the highest-quality research is submitted to and ultimately published in the journal, the Impact Factor of Advanced Materials has kept on increasing to 30.849 (2021 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics), surpassing 30 for the first time. Advanced Materials thereby remains among the top journals across six subject categories in Web of Science, including multidisciplinary materials science (#9/383), nanoscience & technology (#3/127), applied physics (#5/171), and multidisciplinary chemistry (#5/219). Furthermore, in the latest Google Scholar ranking of top publications, Advanced Materials is listed again as the #6 journal globally, with an h5-index of 294. The highest-cited articles published in 2018 or 2019 that thus have contributed most to these results are included in Table 1. We congratulate these authors on their great success. While energy-related topics such as solar cells, batteries, and catalysis keep on attracting significant interest from our readership, we have also seen a steady growth in manuscripts covering biomedical, electronics, and photonics applications, as well more fundamental research into materials physics/engineering/chemistry. Altogether, in 2021 Advanced Materials received, for the first time, more than 10 000 submissions. Out of the articles that made it to publication, Table 2 highlights those that received the most public attention on social media and in various news outlets, as indicated by their Altmetric Score. Well done to these authors! In reflection of the rapid growth of the journal, four new Deputy Editors have been appointed to Advanced Materials this year: James Cook (Weinheim, Germany; post-acceptance role), Babak Mostaghaci (Weinheim), Ekaterina Perets (Berlin, Germany), and Lu Shi (Shanghai, China). Together with Jos Lenders (Editor-in-Chief; Weinheim), Duoduo Liang (Deputy Editor; Beijing, China), and Esther Levy (Consulting Editor; Sydney, Australia), the renewed leadership team of Advanced Materials is very much looking forward to continuing to work together with you. Last year, we published six special issues, both targeted on hot topics that are central to the aims and scope of the journal or with top research institutions around the world (see Table 3 and Figure 1). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our guest editors for their enthusiasm and support, without which such projects would not be possible. Volume 33, Issue 6 (institutional issue) Volume 33, Issue 19 (topical issue) Volume 33, Issue 28 (topical issue) Volume 33, Issue 46 (topical issue) Volume 33, Issue 47 (institutional issue) Volume 33, Issue 50 (institutional issue) We are pleased to see both the quality and international reach of these special issues and will also in the new year continue with this tradition to bring you the latest trends in modern materials science. For 2022/2023, we are working on several special issues focusing on topics of current interest, including organic semiconductors, 2D materials in integrated circuits, quantum materials, photonic nanomaterials, and neuromorphic engineering. To celebrate the anniversaries of excellent research institutes and their successes, also this year we are working with several universities to highlight their scientific achievements; in addition other special issues are in the works to highlight regional successes and partnerships. In 2021 it was ten years since Prof. Yury Gogotsi (Drexel University, USA) and co-workers published their seminal first report on the discovery of MXenes in Advanced Materials. To showcase a decade of MXene research, we presented a special virtual issue of recent remarkable original research and review articles published in Advanced Materials and other Wiley journals dedicated to this exciting class of materials. On this occasion, on October 18, 2021 we also hosted an online symposium entitled “MXenes: Looking Ahead to the Next Ten Years”, with Prof. Yury Gogotsi, Prof. Bin Xu (Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China), Prof. Valeria Nicolosi (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), and Prof. Husam Alshareef (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia) as speakers. The webinar reached a global audience of over 1100 participants watching the livestream. Thank you, in case you joined us, for making this a successful event. In addition to our special and virtual issues, Advanced Materials publishes special series of articles in our regular issues. For instance, you might already have discovered our Editor's Choice articles, which recognize outstanding (top 5%) contributions to the Advanced family of journals as selected by our editors and reviewers. We also continue to expand our Hall of Fame series of Reviews written by leading international researchers in the field of materials science, with contributions in 2021 by our Editorial Advisory Board members Pulickel Ajayan, Katsuhiko Ariga, Paul Blom, Cyrille Boyer, Jian Ping Gong, Andreas Hirsch, David Kaplan, Maria Antonietta Loi, Yueh-Lin Loo, Chad Mirkin, Hsing-Wen Sung, Lianzhou Wang, Yang Yang, Jihong Yu, and Ni Zhao—and more to appear in the coming year. Advanced Materials is dedicated to giving equal opportunities to the diverse community of researchers in publishing their high-quality research. In collaboration with Advanced Science, Advanced Healthcare Materials, and Small, and complementary to our Hall of Fame series, we have started the Rising Stars series intended to collect and promote excellent Research Articles on studies conceptualized and supervised by recognized early-stage career researchers who started their independent research group within the last five years. With many nominations from our Editorial Advisory Board members and keeping an overall topical and geographical balance in mind, we have invited more than 90 young researchers to submit their work to Advanced Materials. A featured special virtual collection will be updated regularly with the latest Rising Stars articles from all four journals, which will be freely accessible for a limited time. Moreover, Advanced Materials, together with its sister journals Advanced Science, Advanced Functional Materials, and Small, is proud to present the “Women in Materials Science” series. This virtual issue collects exemplary works created, steered, and led by women scientists around the world, demonstrating the high impact these leading individuals have on the research published with us, while shaping the scientific landscape and inspiring new generations of scientists to come. This collection was published first in January 2021 and updated in July 2021. The third expansion will be added in early 2022 and selected articles will be freely accessible for the duration of two months, in celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, 2022 and International Women's Day on March 8, 2022. The corresponding special virtual collection will be updated frequently with the most recent and impactful articles from these top-tier journals. At the beginning of last year, Advanced Materials and Advanced Materials Technologies implemented new reviewer questionnaires and an associated set of reviewer guidelines. These were designed to better support reviewers with their evaluation of manuscripts and aid editors with their decisions. The feedback from reviewers and editors alike was overwhelmingly positive. We would like to thank all who took the time to share their thoughts and valuable suggestions with us. This gave us the confidence to roll out optimized reviewer questionnaires to the wider Advanced family and other sister journals later in the year. We hope this initiative has resulted in an enhanced experience not only for our reviewers but also our authors. Greater transparency in the peer review and editorial decision-making process is seen as a potential means to improve author experience and reduce bias. As a first step in this direction Advanced Materials Technologies, Advanced Healthcare Materials, Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics, and Energy Technology are trialing a workflow where reviewers are notified of the editorial decision as soon as it is made, and anonymized reviewer reports are shared with them. We anticipate that this workflow will also be rolled out to Advanced Materials and all other Advanced journals at a later stage. To help standardize data reporting, our editorial teams are developing submission checklists: cover sheets that will become a part of our submission process for new Research Articles. With input from expert researchers, each checklist will indicate what we consider the absolute minimum parameters that should be reported in manuscripts for a particular field of research. We envision that these cover sheets will assist authors to understand data reporting expectations and guide their manuscript preparation, as well as aiding reviewers during manuscript evaluation. Ultimately, we might also publish them as part of the online supporting information, such that they can benefit our readers. At the moment, Advanced Energy Materials is running a pilot with checklists for research contributions involving the performance and stability of solar cells or of batteries and supercapacitors. Additional checklists for other research fields such as catalysis and biomedical/health/life sciences are under development. Given the positive initial feedback from the research community, our goal is to implement such checklists for other Advanced family journals, including Advanced Materials, in the near future. To further enhance the accessibility and discoverability of the articles that we publish and to facilitate scientific discussions and collaborations around them, Advanced Materials is, together with Advanced Science, Advanced Functional Materials, and Energy Technology, participating in a pilot in which these journals’ content on Wiley Online Library is being made directly available in parallel through the ResearchGate platform. For subscription-based content, academic users can gain instant and automatic access through their applicable institutional license. ResearchGate is a free platform used by 19 million researchers globally to share research and connect with other researchers in their fields. Our hope is therefore that in this way your research output published with us will become visible to an even wider audience. We are constantly trying to cater to the needs of the scientific community and serve them in the most efficient ways. On par with the current trends in the scientific community, Open Research has found a pivotal role at Wiley and for our journals. Several relevant projects have been started across the Advanced family of journals, including the interactive/preprint pilot project currently ongoing in our sister journal, Advanced Intelligent Systems. The project encompasses publishing Smart Supporting Information or Interactive Preprints on the Authorea platform (a Wiley company). All documents have their independent DOI and will be linked to the Version of Record upon the publication of the main version on Wiley Online Library. These projects enable our authors to publish interactive and data-driven figures, executable and responsive codes, and 3D structures alongside their papers. Further, the interactive preprints will be online a couple of days after submission, which brings more visibility to the papers. Since the start of the project a few months ago, we have received encouraging feedback from our authors. By being part of a tightly connected journals’ network, Advanced Materials offers you the option to easily transfer your paper to another journal in the portfolio if your manuscript isn't accepted. There's no need to go through a new submission process, saving you time, effort, and increasing the chance of your work being published, and faster. More information on our transfer network and how it facilitates the publication of your manuscript can now be found in our new transfer guidelines. In 2020, we launched the Advanced X Research series of open access journals to complement our existing family of “hybrid” Advanced journals. Building on the success of Advanced Photonics Research, Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research, and Advanced NanoBiomed Research, we are happy to announce that, in the coming year, we will be launching a number of additional fully open access titles in the Advanced X Research family, covering even more areas of research in the natural sciences. Watch this space! Accepted Articles: As of September 2021, accepted articles were introduced for Advanced Materials. On acceptance, the accepted article will be prepared and then posted online. The accepted version of the article should be online in Wiley Online Library before authors receive their proof. Importantly, as this does mean the article is published, this also means that, if you are submitting a patent on the work in the article, or aspects thereof, it is most important to have everything complete ahead of initial submission. It's also important for reviews, for example, that all copyright permissions are secured and in place ahead of acceptance. We encourage authors to have everything completed before initial submission. Further information can be found in our author guidelines. Proofing: Proofing is now done using our html online proofing system. This is an online editing tool where text proof edits are made directly in the article. Commenting tools and the functionality to upload revised ancillary files, like corrected figures, are also available. This streamlines the proofing process, which is important given the higher number of submissions and therefore articles to be published. The pdf version for publication is then created from the proof corrected xml underneath the editing interface for direct publication. Printing: As part of the Wiley general commitment to develop a greener, more environmentally responsible and sustainable business model, Advanced Materials is moving to online-only publication from January 2022. There will still be the possibility for print-on-demand, but this program is aimed at larger numbers of copies only. We are excited to bring you a great set of articles for our first issue of 2022. The issue features 2 Reviews from the Hall of Fame series, from Maria Antonietta Loi (article number 2105844) and David Kaplan (article number 2105196) and their coauthors, who discuss tin halide perovskites for solar cells and fiber-based biopolymer processing respectively. In the other Reviews, together with their coauthors, Xu Wang (article number 2101665) highlights the recent advances of fluorinated graphene with regard to synthesis and applications, Younan Xia (article number 2102591) brings us the latest on bimetallic Janus nanocrystals, Xian Jun Loh (article number 2102703) discusses the evolution of machine-learning-driven biomaterials, Utkan Demirci (article number 2103646) gives the current status of point-of-care testing technologies for detection of human acute respiratory viruses, Kanyi Pu (article number 2103790) analyzes bioinspired and biomimetic delivery platforms for cancer vaccines, and Ellen Roels (article number 2104798) reviews processing of self-healing polymers for soft robotics. In addition, in their Perspective, Jun Lu, Khalil Amine, and their co-workers (article number 2106148) consider the role of lithium iodide in lithium–oxygen batteries. As to the Research Articles, we would like to highlight Giulia Grancini's contribution to the Rising Stars series (article number 2105942), demonstrating how to manipulate color emission in 2D hybrid perovskites by fine-tuning the halide segregation. The front cover of this first issue of 2022 highlights work from Dave Mitlin (article number 2106005), where the birthday cake and the melting candles represent a sodium-metal anode and associated dendrites. We wish you all the very best for the new year in your scientific and personal life. Thank you for your support of our journal. On behalf of the editorial team of Advanced Materials,