In the Best of Health
Authors: Lorna Stimson
Journal: Advanced Healthcare Materials (2015)

The last year has seen some changes in the Advanced Healthcare Materials editorial office so I would like to take this opportunity to reintroduce the team responsible for the journal. In July, I took over as Editor-in-Chief from José Oliveira, who had been at the helm since the journal was launched at the end of 2011. José and Peter Gregory, Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Materials, continue to lend their expertise to Advanced Healthcare Materials in their roles as Consulting Editors. Also working on the selection and peer review of papers for Advanced Healthcare Materials, alongside other journals in the Advanced family, are Emily Hu and Adam Brotchie. Authors will also be familiar with Ana Valente who takes care of successful papers once they are accepted, our Production Manager Christine Herth, and Melanie Rettenmaier who provides our administrative support. In the 2014 Journal Citation Report we were pleased to receive our first Impact Factor of 4.882. As a new journal, this value is a partial one-year impact factor calculated on the basis of papers published in 2012. Of course, impact factors are not a comprehensive measure of a journal's performance and in reality represent an average citation rate for individual papers. Nevertheless, this inaugural value, together with our 2014 Immediacy Index of 1.285, provides us with a solid foundation on which to build in future years. Some of the top papers that contributed to this achievement can be seen in Table 1. Over the last year we have published many excellent papers and have seen increasing numbers of submissions focussing on materials that tackle diabetes, electronics for biomedical applications, printing and assembly of cellular materials, systems to control oxidative stress, as well as in the better established fields of cancer therapy, delivery systems, theranostics, and tissue engineering. Figure 2 and Table 2 show the most popular keywords and most downloaded papers in 2014, respectively. As knowledge and understanding in the physical sciences advances, the complexity of living systems is no longer out of reach; these hot topics are indicative of the many fast-moving research areas in the field of biomedical materials that have resulted from this advancement. Alongside papers from many different areas of materials science for healthcare applications, this year we published special issues on advanced drug delivery systems and on functional polymers for healthcare, and in the coming year we plan to publish Special Issues on engineering of soft tissues and in memory of Prof. Kahp Yang Suh, a well-known and respected member of biomedical materials community who tragically passed away in 2013. As Open Access publishing continues to become more and more important to researchers and funding agencies. Advanced Healthcare Materials provides the opportunity to make work published in the journal freely available through Wiley Online Open. Now, to complement the Online Open program, at the end of 2014, the Advanced Materials editorial office announced the launch of an exciting new interdisciplinary fully open access journal, Advanced Science www.advancedscience.com. Alongside the other journals in the Advanced Materials family including Advanced Healthcare Materials, this new journal offers a forum for the publication of the best research. At this time, I would like to thank the Editorial Advisory Board for their help and advice over the last year, all those who submitted to the journal, and last but certainly not least all those reviewers who help to maintain the standards of the journal. I would especially like to mention our most frequent reviewers, Prof. Omid Farokhzad, Prof. Akhilesh Gaharwar, Prof. Andrés García, Prof. Li Gu, Prof. Xuesi Chen, Prof. João F. Mano, Prof. Wolfgang Parak, Prof. Shiyong Liu, Prof. Kevin Baker, Prof. Zhuang Liu, and Prof. Dietmar Hutmacher for their generous contributions to the success of the journal. The start of a new year is always an exciting time with so much to look back on and much to look forward to. I wish you all a happy and healthy 2015!