Advanced Energy Materials Turns Five

Advanced Energy Materials started in 2010 as a Special Section in Advanced Materials dedicated to energy-related research. Fast-forward five years, and we are now a full-fledged bimonthly journal, with over 2000 submissions from over 50 countries every year. We have evolved from a traditional print run to enhanced media, from page numbers to article numbers, and from a new, unknown journal to one of the best multidisciplinary materials-science journals, a top venue for the dissemination of novel energy research. Looking back, the journal began at a turning point for researchers working in energy topics, when governments from east to west began unfolding various initiatives to diminish the world's reliance on traditional energy sources, and seeking with interest new renewable energy alternatives. Government-sponsored funding was shifted to universities and research institutes with solid backgrounds in sustainable energy resources. As a result the scientific output, notably the number of papers in the area, started to increase. We have witnessed substantial breakthroughs in battery materials, solar cells, fuel cells, hydrogen generation, thermoelectric materials, and many more. The active expansion of the community has been significant. Materials innovation originating from fundamental science showed the great potential of basic research being transferred into real applications. We saw a significant increase in the number of submissions from industry, including, for example, one of our most-cited articles, “Device Characteristics of CZTSSe Thin-Film Solar Cells with 12.6% Efficiency”, by Prof. Mitzi and coworkers (DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201301465), work developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Joint authorships between academia and industry are also more and more common. As editors of Advanced Energy Materials, it is a privilege for us to be invited to join local and international conferences, where we have the opportunity to meet researchers and exchange ideas. We have noticed that even people working in fields not directly energy-related are now investing time and manpower into energy, and we are delighted to see that energy materials have become so attractive and interesting for researchers of other disciplines, who are joining forces and pushing forward the boundaries of this important field. Although the journal has been growing steadily since its launch, competition for publication space is now more intense than ever before. Researchers are working under great pressure to obtain the best materials, the best performance, or record efficiencies. At the same time, reviewers tend to be strict and critical when manuscripts don't illustrate high values and strong advances. While moderate competition can facilitate the birth of new ideas within the community, malignant competition imposes negative effects, leading to, for example, result manipulation. Perovskite solar cells, an example that has come into light recently, is a hot area of research due to the significant improvement in photoelectric conversion efficiency they permitted. The efficiency record improved with every new paper published. This trend is now on hold, since authors, readers, and reviewers started questioning the reliability of the work being presented, and the fact that results could not be replicated. Efficiency can now only be trusted when third-party certification is obtained. On the other hand, the advancement of perovskite solar cells was not hindered by criticism and need for certification. These issues have enlightened researchers, who started thinking back to the basic science behind the high efficiencies and other important issues that need to be tackled and solved. Reproducibility and reliability in research are old topics. Many medical and life sciences journals have required that authors upload original raw data for internal and external evaluation. Materials-science journals have almost no requirements when it comes to original raw data, with the exception of ethical misconduct investigations. However, many of the problems arising recently are due to the limited testing of samples, use of different batches of raw materials or chemicals, measurements without careful calibration, and more. Such problems cause new publications to confuse the community and hinder the advancement of the field. Unlike solar-cell certification, other fields still don't have a universal methodology to confirm reported properties, such as batteries, supercapacitors, and photocatalysts. These are topics we would like to discuss with researchers and board members in our next conference visits and meetings. We welcome your feedback, since initiatives such as these can improve the reliability of the results published and also facilitate the utilization of these results in stimulating further discoveries. Since the first impact factor of Advanced Energy Materials was released in 2013, the journal's performance has caught researchers' attention. This year's record-high impact factor of 16.146 highlights the journal's growth and its importance within our community. The impact factor is, as we like to remind ourselves and our readership, merely a journal-level statistical number that cannot be used to evaluate the impact of each individual article. Although it's impossible to tell the true impact of a published manuscript, Altmetric is creating a new way of measuring the social impact of a paper by monitoring and analyzing the mentions of published science papers in social media and online portals. We hope this new approach can help scientists to educate society regarding their important discoveries on energy materials. As we mentioned earlier, submissions to Advanced Energy Materials have increased dramatically, reflecting the great support received by researchers in the renewable-energy community. In order to give extra exposure to some recent achievements, we published two special issues last year: one dedicated to highlighting lithium-sulfur batteries (Issue 16), and the other focusing on the stability issues of organic and perovskite solar cells (Issue 20). The increasing number of submissions, as mentioned before, creates great competition for publication space. In order to expand this space and create more opportunities for the publication of high-impact, high-quality research, we have enriched our publishing portfolio by launching new journals and tuning the scope of existing journals for the last several years, with Advanced Healthcare Materials, Advanced Optical Materials, Advanced Materials Interfaces, Particle & Particle Systems Characterization, Advanced Electronic Materials, and Advanced Science (open-access) having been launched since Advanced Energy Materials. The success our journals have achieved in 2015 would not have been possible without the continued support of our Editorial Advisory Board members, our authors, reviewers, and readers. For Advanced Energy Materials, we anticipate an ever-growing number of manuscript submissions in 2016, which will again give us editors the privilege and challenge of picking the best of the best for publication. I hope to see your next high-quality and high-impact manuscript amongst them!