Ten Years of Advanced Functional Materials (2009)

2010 marks the tenth year of publication of Advanced Functional Materials. Since Advanced Materials for Optics and Electronics was re-launched in 2001 as Advanced Functional Materials, the journal has published more than 2000 Full Papers and Feature Articles on all aspects of materials science. In those ten years, it has become the number one full paper materials science journal thanks to the support of the materials science community, leading in areas such as photovoltaics and organic electronics. What was cutting edge in materials science ten years ago, and what is cutting edge today? We can get an idea by comparing the frequency of keywords used to describe articles from 2001 and 2009. In the plots below, the size of the keyword corresponds to the frequency of its appearance. In 2001, Advanced Functional Materials published a number of articles on polymers, devices, films, and nanoparticles. By 2009, the relative frequency of those first three topics had declined while that of nanoparticles increased (as you may have suspected). In 2001, the study of organic thin-film transistors was still gathering steam, with a single publication.1 By 2009, however, rapid progress had been made, and nearly 50 publications on organic, polymer, graphene, and carbon nanotube transistors appeared in the journal. Let your eye run over these images; I hope you enjoy these snapshots in time of research as much as I do. One of my favorite things about Advanced Functional Materials is the attractive cover designs. Looking back to 2001, the covers of the very first issue featured papers on topics that are still very much relevant today. The first outside cover was by Ozin et al. on solid oxide fuel cell electrodes,2 while the first inside cover accompanied a Feature Article on plastic solar cells by Sariciftci and co-workers.3 This Feature Article went on to be the most cited article of all time in Advanced Functional Materials, with more than 1450 citations to date. We redesigned the cover of Advanced Functional Materials last year so that even more focus would be on the stunning images produced by our authors. If you take a look at the 2009 Cover Gallery (http://bit.ly/AFM2009covers), I hope you will agree that this redesign was successful—which is your favorite? We're looking forward to seeing what combinations of art and science our authors produce for the covers of the journal in 2010. One of the most significant developments in the last decade of publication of Advanced Functional Materials has been the growth in quality scientific output from China. In 2001, a single paper listed a Chinese institution for a corresponding author, [4] but by last year nearly 14% of the manuscripts published in the journal were by Chinese authors. To reflect the growing influence of Chinese materials science worldwide, we have taken our popular materials science news website MaterialsViews.com and launched a Chinese-language version, MaterialsViewsChina.com. Like MaterialsViews.com, MaterialsViewsChina.com provides updates on the latest materials science research, interviews with leading researchers, and more. Be sure to visit either website and sign up for the email list to be the first to get regular updates and insider-only information. Sincere thanks to our talented authors, hard-working reviewers, and dedicated readers for supporting the Advanced Functional Materials community. I'm looking forward to reading your next manuscript and finding out what exciting, interesting, and unexpected materials science 2010 will bring.