Deep Impact

By Alison Green*

The simplest measure of the quality of a scientific journal ishow frequently its papers are cited, i.e., its Impact Factor (IF).[1]

According to the latest compilation of IFs, Advanced Materialsremains the most highly cited publication in materials science.Its IF of 5.415 is almost 10 % higher than last year (see Table 1).

Table 1. 1999 and 1998 ISI Impact Factors (IFs) for selected materials sciencejournals, and materials-related chemistry and physics journals.

Materials science appears to be experiencing a boom, thetotal number of publications in the category "MaterialsScience" (see Table 2) reaching 159Ðalmost double that offour years ago. In addition, the IFs of most materials sciencejournals have risen (all bar two of the journals listed in Table1), a trend not seen so clearly in the traditional disciplines ofphysics and chemistry. Indeed the IF for Advanced Materialsis comparable to leading journals in chemistry and physics:the Journal of the American Chemical Society has an IF of5.537 (last year 5.725) while that of Physical Review Letters is6.095 (last year 6.017). Thus it seems that the scientific com-munity is enjoying the application of these traditional fields tomore high tech materials. Indeed, the ªCoatings and Filmsºbranch of materials science is also thriving, all the journals inthis category showing increased IFs, including the very highlyrated Chemical Vapor Deposition, which is in 2nd place withan IF of 2.155 (see Table 3).

Advanced Materials is certainly enjoying the effects of theintensified activity in materials researchÐwith the increase inpublication frequency from 18 to 24 issues, we have seen aneven steeper rise in the number of submitted manuscripts.Thus it seems timely to announce that, from the start of 2001,Advanced Materials will have a full-paper sister journal, Ad-vanced Functional Materials. This will be discussed in moredetail in an Editorial Essay in the next issue, but if you can'twait, take a look the home page: http://www.wiley-vch.de/home/afm/.

Other exciting developments include the introduction of anew section, Advanced Materials Interviews, the first in thisseries, with Prof. Gerhard Wegner, appearing in issue 15, andthe second, with Prof. Dietrich Haarer, in issue 17. Interviewswith Richard Friend, Jean-Marie Lehn, and Will Rees will fol-low soon. Meanwhile, those who attended the InternationalConference on Synthetic Metals (ICSM 2000) in Austria inJuly will know that Advanced Materials awarded prizes forthe three most innovative research contributions. Details ofthe winners and their research will be revealed in an up-coming issue. The award is set to continue at the next ICSMmeeting to be held in Shanghai in 2002.

Of course the impressive IF achieved by Advanced Materi-als reflects primarily the scientific quality of the published pa-pers. Thus we are grateful for the considerable effort investedby our referees, and hope that the authors and readers willcontinue to enjoy the increasing impact of the exciting and in-novative ideas that are published in this journal.

Adv. Mater. 2000, 12, No. 18, September 15 Ó WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH, D-69469 Weinheim, 2000 0935-9648/00/1809-1313 $ 17.50+.50/0 1313

ESSAY

±[1] The Impact Factor (IF) of a journal in 1999 is defined by the Institute for

Scientific Information (ISI) as: (the number of citations made in all jour-nals published in 1999 to articles published in the journal in 1998 and1997) divided by (the number of articles published in the journal in 1998and 1997). Generally speaking, the IF is a comparative (rather than abso-lute) measure of the average citations per article. Full details are availablefrom the ISI, Philadelphia, USA at http://www.isinet.com.

[*] Dr. A. GreenAssociate Editor, Advanced MaterialsWILEY-VCHPappelallee 3, D-69469 Weinheim (Germany)

Table 2. Total number of journals listed in the materials science category in theISI database.

Table 3. 1999 and 1998 ISI Impact Factors (IFs) for original research journals infields relating to CVD.