Materials Horizons in 2019

The Royal Society of Chemistry launched Materials Horizons as its premier materials journal five years ago. It had the goal of providing the community a multidisciplinary society-based journal that focuses broadly on the area of materials, accepting only top quality papers, with a very strong emphasis on new conceptual advances and where the articles are accessible to both experts and non-experts. The entire Editorial team and the Editorial Board are committed to upholding these guiding principles, to make the journal distinct in its appeal, and of value in particular to younger or less experienced readers. Over the past five years Materials Horizons has grown, been embraced by the community, established a reputation for quality, and has developed a quite respectable impact factor over 13. Some factors that contributed to its success to date are:

1. The decision not to publish papers, only in the “hot” areas, where “record” performance, could be sole drivers. While this decision might have impacted the rate of growth of the journal and its impact factor, it was essential to allow it to develop its own personality that has been embraced by the community.

2. The creation of Focus Articles that educate the community on important topics where misconceptions may exist or where emerging ideas of importance can be explained clearly and succinctly. This goal of educating the community is a core value of the editorial team and we seek to have all authors think about not only the content within, but also the clarity of their papers. Authors of Focus Articles, and both Reviews and Minireviews are held to a particularly high standard in this regard.

3. The core value of embracing diversity. We sought to have diverse Editorial, Advisory and Community Boards in terms of gender, technical background, geographic place of origin, and stage of career.

4. Listening carefully to the community, in particular actively soliciting input from early career readers, which led to the creation of our Community Board, populated by senior graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors, who provide us with some of the most detailed and insightful advice we receive.

As we enter the 5th year and 6th volume, we strive to continually improve, carefully considering the feedback from you our readers, about those aspects of the journal you particularly like, and perhaps more importantly those aspects of the journal where you think we can improve. With this in mind in a coming Editorial we will attempt to provide additional insight about two aspects of the journal where we think we can provide greater guidance and transparency about the review process. We will also update our website with this guidance. These areas are the pre-selection process and greater clarity about what constitutes a conceptual advance. We very much look forward to receiving submissions that you feel meet the criteria for the journal and we strongly encourage you to contact any of us if you have feedback for how we can better serve the community.

At this point on behalf of the entire editorial team we thank you for your support of Materials Horizons and want to emphasize that we are looking forward to continuing to serve you!

Professor Seth R. Marder, Editorial Board Chair

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE), Georgia Institute of Technology GA, Atlanta 30332-0400, USA

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6921-2536

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