Advanced Materials: Beyond the Horizon of Materials Science (2023)

Welcome to the 35th volume of Advanced Materials and the first issue of 2023. We're happy to be reflecting back on a successful year for the journal. With the strongest support of our authors and reviewers, Advanced Materials is continuing to make records of its own: while the journal published over 1500 articles from more than 11000 submissions last year, its impact factor kept on increasing to 32.086 (2022 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics). With this impact factor, Advanced Materials remains among the top journals (and even improved its position) across six subject categories in Web of Science, including multidisciplinary materials science (#8/345), nanoscience & technology (#3/109), applied physics (#5/161), and multidisciplinary chemistry (#5/179). Furthermore, in the latest Google Scholar ranking of top publications, Advanced Materials is listed again as the #6 journal globally (#1 Chemical & Materials Science, #2 Engineering & Computer Science), with an h5-index of 312. Highly cited papers have contributed the most in these successful results. The highest-cited articles published in 2019 or 2020 are included in Table 1. We congratulate these authors on their great success. While papers on photocatalysis and electrocatalysis attracted huge attention from our readers, we have seen a significant attention toward technology-related topics like wearable systems and electronic skin, as well as fundamental and physical aspects of materials science. However, impact factor won't be the only metric reported by Wiley journals anymore. As an advocate for responsible research assessment, Wiley signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in May 2022 to formally commit to diverse measurement of impact and contribution. We have started to add additional metrics to our journals’ homepages and promotional materials, such as Journal Citation Indicator (Clarivate), CiteScore (Scopus), and SNIP (Scopus), aiming to provide a well-rounded view of the value and impact of any author's contribution to the field. Public attention toward scientific papers, measured by Altmetric Score, has become increasingly important. We are glad to see that several papers published in Advanced Materials in 2022 were highlighted by important news outlets or social media channels. Table 2 shows the papers with the highest Altmetric Score. Congratulations to these authors! We published five special issues in 2022, that featured new dynamics and robustness in conventional materials sub-fields or highlighted the scientific achievements from top research institutions around the world (see Table 3 and Figure 1). In particular, the regional boom has seen the fast-growing material research scene in Singapore. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our guest editors for their enthusiasm and support, without which such projects would not be possible. We are also pleased to see both the quality and international reach of these special issues and will continue with this tradition to bring you the latest trends in modern materials science in the upcoming year. For 2023/2024, we are working on several special issues focusing on topics of current interest, including nanozymes, photonic nanomaterials, quantum materials, hygroscopic materials, and materials for biomedical applications and neuromorphic engineering. With the increasing demand in applications of technologies and more research activities becoming multidisciplinary, we will introduce more special issues targeted on cross-systems, and trans-disciplinary research that are central to the aims and scope of the journal. Last year, we started the Rising Stars series dedicated to supporting early-stage career researchers across a wide range of disciplines by selecting and publishing their research output at the highest quality standards. The featured virtual collection is updated regularly with the latest Rising Stars articles, which will be freely accessible for a limited time. Following the first batch of invitations to more than 90 young researchers, we have added 41 candidates this year to keep an overall topical and geographical balance. We hope that this series, as part of our diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, will continuously offer an additional platform to researchers in the early stages of their career an opportunity to showcase their creativity and help driving the impact, and to engage the early career scientists across different areas of materials research broadly. Advanced Materials, together with its sister journals Advanced Science, Advanced Functional Materials, Small, and Advanced Materials Technologies continues to update 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 first published in January 2021 and updated in July 2021. The third expansion was added in February 2022 and the selected articles were freely accessible for the duration of three 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 fourth update was launched in July 2022 with 28 of the most recent and impactful articles from these top-tier journals, and the next one is planned for early 2023. To enhance transparency of our editorial decision-making process, we introduced a workflow where reviewers of manuscripts at Advanced Materials and its sister journals are notified of the editorial decision for manuscripts they reviewed immediately after the decision is made. The other, anonymized, reviewer reports are also shared with them. This gives our reviewers valuable insight into their peers’ evaluation of the manuscript and additional guidance as to the journal's standards. The feedback we have received from our reviewers indicates they are appreciative not just of the information provided in the notification but also how it acknowledges the important contribution they make to upholding our stringent requirements. To help standardize data reporting, our editorial teams continue to develop submission checklists that become a part of our submission process for new Research Articles. Each checklist indicates what we consider the absolute minimum parameters that should be reported in manuscripts for a particular field of research. These checklists not only help authors understand data reporting expectations and guide their manuscript preparation, but also aid reviewers during manuscript evaluation. In the course of the year, we will start to publish the checklists alongside the article Supporting Information for all accepted articles. After the successful pilot of the solar cells or of batteries and supercapacitors checklists in Advanced Energy Materials in 2021, these two checklists have been implemented in most of our family of journals, including Advanced Materials. Additional checklists for other research fields such as catalysis, biological and biomedical sciences, and machine Learning are currently being finalized and will be piloted in 2023 in Advanced Materials as well as other family journals. The Advanced family of journals have been a trustable source for researchers to find high-quality papers about different materials science topics. To better respond to the needs of the community. We launched two new Advanced journals in 2022: Advanced Physics Research is an open-access journal, publishing high-quality experimental and theoretical research in the field of applied and fundamental physics. The scope of the journal covers topics including condensed matter physics, materials physics, semiconductor physics, quantum physics, and chemical physics. Advanced Sensor Research is also an open-access journal publishing high-quality research encompassing all aspects of sensing. The journal publishes papers on topics including physical sensors, chemical sensors, optical sensors, biosensors, and sensing devices. We hope you enjoy reading (or submitting to) these two exciting journals! Reflecting the growing movement towards openly accessible published research, our two sister Advanced titles, Advanced Electronic Materials, Advanced Materials Interfaces are converted to fully open access journal from January 2023. We are very excited to embrace open publishing, which will help the journal to continue to attract the very best papers in the field. We are also looking forward to everyone being able to read the journal irrespective of specialty, host institution, or location. The Advanced family of journals has been continuously expanding in the last few decades. The Best of Advanced 2022 presents the editors’ selection of some of the most outstanding articles of the year published in our prestigious Advanced family of journals. We hope this series will give our authors a better understanding of the whole portfolio. For this first issue of 2023, the front cover is for article number 2208299, in the Editor's Choice series, by Bing Ni, Sara Bals, Luis M. Liz Marzán, and co-workers, who describe how plasmonic optical activity in chiral nanoparticles can be tuned and optimized through the chiral morphological details and how twisted gold nanorods evolve through removal of mirror symmetry during dissymmetric seeded growth. In article number 2205194, Seung Woo Lee, Bumjoon J. Kim, and co-workers report the structure–property–electrochemical performance relationship of an elastomeric electrolyte system, for achieving high-energy solid-state lithium-metal batteries, which is highlighted on the inside front cover. The inside back cover article, article number 2207280, by Julien Warnan and co-workers, shows how how a hybrid material from a metal–organic framework and molecular rhenium complex enables light-driven accumulation of long-lived electrons. The back cover article by Ji Liu and co-workers, article number 2207587, shows how a hydrogel material with a distinct 2D lamellar structure demonstrates unprecedented impact-resistance characteristics. Highlighted on the two frontispieces in the issue, Dae-Yoon Kim, Kwang-Un Jeong, and co-workers report 1D stripe and 2D wavy wrinkled photonic crystal papers, which demonstrate consistent reflection of colors regardless of viewing angle, in article number 2206764, and in article number 2207317, Cesare Soci and co-workers introduce their perovskite light-emitting metatransistor, a radically new light-emitting device concept. We also bring you one article from the Rising Stars series, article number 2207305, where Ben Liu and Lizhi Sun report mesoporous palladium–nonmetal (meso-PdX) nanocubes as a new series of highly efficient electrocatalysts for selective nitrate reduction reaction (NITRR) electrocatalysis to NH3. A second Editor's Choice article, article number 2208237, by Bo Wang, Dianlong Wang, Tao Cheng, and co-workers, discusses how a molecular-crowding electrolyte can be applied in zinc-ion batteries for stable low-temperature battery operation. In addition, the issue features a Hall of Fame review, article number 2110236, by Xun Shi, Lidong Chen and co-workers, who summarize the latest advances in Ag2Q-based (Q = S, Se, Te) silver chalcogenide thermoelectric materials. We hope you enjoy reading these and the other reviews and research articles featured in the issue. 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, James, Esther, Duoduo, Babak, Kate, Lu, and Jos