Preface to the 50th anniversary issue of the Journal of Materials Science

In his book ‘‘The Coming of Materials Science’’ [1], the late Professor Robert Wolfgang Cahn FRS documented the rise of Materials Science as a distinct discipline from its roots in solid-state physics, metallurgy, polymer chemistry, inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, glass, and ceramic technology. The development of the discipline was a process in which he was intimately involved from 1942 when he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge to read Metallurgy, to his death from leukemia in 2007. His technical contributions were remarkably diverse, spanning such areas as: defects and deformation mechanisms, crystal growth, recrystallization, intermetallic compounds, and metallic glasses. It was these broad interests that led him to become such a staunch advocate for Materials Science as a discipline. Another of his passions was scientific editing, and he is remembered as much for his editing of several major journals and books as he is for his scientific research work. In 1964, Robert Cahn was invited by the publishers Chapman and Hall to establish the Journal of Materials Science as the first broad-spectrum Materials Science journal. As Chairman of Editors, he recruited a group of Editors with complementary areas of expertise, gave them independent powers of decision on submitted papers, and encouraged them to be pro-active in soliciting papers from key researchers on novel topics. This helped to ensure that the journal fulfilled its mission of being a broad-spectrum inclusive periodical that brought together work on different classes of materials using a wide variety of different experimental and theoretical approaches. The first issue appeared in April of 1966, and the Journal grew rapidly over the next few years to become a major international forum for research in Materials Science. In Robert Cahn’s memoirs [2], he said that the years he devoted to creating the Journal of Materials Science represented his single most important editorial contribution to the field. Over the last five decades, there have been many changes to the Journal, to the community that it serves, and to the field as a whole. The publishers have undergone several re-organizations and changes of ownership, and are now part of the Springer Nature group. Specialist sister journals have been spun off in the areas of Materials in Electronics and Materials in Medicine, while others such as Interface Science have been incorporated into the main journal. The community has broadened to encompass more biologists, chemists, and physicists due to developments in, for example, tissue engineering, nanostructured catalysts, and functional oxides, respectively. There have also been dramatic changes in the synthesis, processing, characterization, and computational modeling techniques available to materials scientists, and these advances have had a revolutionary effect on research directions in the field. Throughout, the Editors have maintained an open and flexible definition of Materials Science so that the Journal remains true to Robert Cahn’s original vision of a broadspectrum publication. This has been helped by stability in the leadership of the Journal with just four Chairmen/ Editors-in-Chief over the first 50 years: Professors Robert Cahn, William Bonfield, Rees Rawlings, and since 2004, C. Barry Carter. In 2006, the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Journal was marked with a special issue (volume 41, issue 3) comprising reviews, original research articles, and commentaries written by current and former Editors. The & Mark Aindow m.aindow@uconn.edu