A Year of Celebrations

As we start 2015, we are not only celebrating a new year, but embracing a new decade of commitment to publishing the best nano and micro research across science, engineering, and medicine. This has been our goal since the launch of Small at the end of 2004. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Small, we hosted two events in East Asia: a special session on Nanotechnology Toward Advanced Healthcare Materials on July 4th at Korea's leading symposium on nanotechnology, NanoKorea, and a celebration on August 5th at Peking University during the 29th Chinese Chemical Society Meeting. Hundreds of loyal readers, authors, referees, and board members attended both events, reflecting the close ties between the research community and the Small editorial team. As we continue to celebrate our success, we will also continue to present high-quality reviews and articles from leading scientists in the nano and micro arena. To coincide with our 10th anniversary, 2014 marked the 10th year since the groundbreaking employment of sellotape by Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov to produce graphene. The past ten years have seen increasing interest in 2D materials, of which graphene is the most famous. The field has grown in leaps and bounds, and last year we published a special issue on the subject: Graphene Research in China. Besides the theory, synthesis and processing of graphene and graphene-like 2D materials, which hold clear importance to fundamental research, their application in electronics, energy storage, and catalysis were also addressed. We hope that this special issue inspired more breakthroughs in graphene research, and stimulated further exciting collaborations between Chinese researchers and scientists worldwide. In the past decade, we have strived to bring you the best articles focusing on the hottest topics across a wide spectrum of nanotechnology. Table 1 summarizes the most downloaded articles over the past 10 years; each paper has been downloaded over 20,000 times. We invite you to have a closer look, to find out why so many readers thought them important and why Small enjoys its reputation as a truly multidisciplinary platform. We start the year with more great papers in nano- and microscience. The front cover by Y. Wang and co-workers from the University of Maryland shows double-walled carbon nanotubes suitable for electronic applications. Also in this issue, Z. Bao from Stanford University demonstrates a semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotube ink for printed transistors. Thanks to modern nanotechnology, the efficiency of inorganic–organic hybrid photovoltaics has improved significantly, and perovskite solar cells have emerged as another hot topic. To give our readers a general overview of perovskite solar cells, we invited pioneers in this field, N.-G. Park and his colleagues from Sungkyunkwan University, to contribute a review article to our first issue of 2015. Nanoscience is young and dynamic, new concepts and breakthroughs continue to emerge, and many great articles wait to be written and published. For the last ten years, we have experienced a continuous growth of submissions and are in a privileged position to read the best papers in the field. We find ourselves returning many good manuscripts already at the pre-screening stage, due the limited space available for publishing this wealth of papers. To help alleviate this situation, we are shifting from fortnightly to weekly publication starting this year. We hope our expanded and more frequent format will continue to please our readers and we look forward to reading your next excellent papers. 2014 was a remarkable year for our whole family of journals. Advanced Energy Materials received its second Impact Factor of 14.385, a remarkable growth illustrating its strong position, attracting the best energy-related studies. Advanced Healthcare Materials received its first ever Impact Factor of 4.88, a good start as it becomes the leading journal for the application of materials in healthcare and biotechnology. Advanced Materials Interfaces was launched as a sister journal of Advanced Materials and is set to become a top journal in surface and interface science. The expansion of our family of journals provides more options for our increasing and discerning authors. We are therefore delighted to announce the launch of two more sister journals: Advanced Electronic Materials and Advanced Science. The latter will be our first interdisciplinary open access journal to cover all aspects of physical, medical, and life sciences, as well as engineering. Last but not least, we are greatly indebted to our advisory board members, authors, reviewers, and readers, who have contributed to a successful decade of Small. We hope to continue to be the premier venue to celebrate your most important discoveries in nanoscience and beyond.