Interfaces and Applications

The year 2020 is over and this has been a year nobody would have predicted back in January. In the first months of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic evolved and began to affect everybody. The whole world came to a stop and our daily lives seemed frozen. By mid-March, Wiley as a leading global publisher had switched to working from home. And while some offices reopened again in late 2020, our German offices remained closed. Working from home has changed the research landscape drastically – both negatively and positively. Obviously, with the labs closed, experiments could not be performed and researchers were halted in their projects; however, they were then able to focus on writing review articles. Indeed, we saw an increased number of review articles being submitted to our journal (+10%); we received an increased number of total submissions from across the globe compared to previous years, publishing well over 400 papers in our 24 issues. In the past year, Advanced Materials Interfaces further strengthened its position as an important journal in the area of interface-based research, with an Impact Factor of 4.948 (2019 Clarivate Journal Citation Reports). Table 1 shows a list of papers from 2017/2018 that contributed most to that success. Many articles have drawn additional attention via news and social media platforms, which is reflected by their high Altmetric score. A selection of articles that had an exceptionally broad impact in the media in 2020 is shown in Table 2. We are grateful to our authors who have submitted many beautiful covers for the journal and Figure 1 shows a selection of our favourites of 2020. With the discontinuation of the Advanced Materials Interfaces’ chemical vapor deposition (CVD) section from the start of 2020, which was dedicated to special layer depositing methods like CVD and atomic layer deposition, the journal is now focusing more on full-story papers that report on both new (interface) materials and their applications. The most popular topics include interfaces in batteries, optoelectronic devices, and catalysis. Issue 5, published in March 2020, was a dedicated special issue on ‘Bottom-Up Assembly of Micro/Nanostructures’ guest edited by Massimo Mastrangeli (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Michele Perego (National Reasearch Council, Italy). For 2021, we have three special issues planned already. The first one will be focused on hierarchically-ordered materials, guest edited by Profs. Wilhelm Schwieger, Matthias Thommes, and Martin Hartmann from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Germany. The second one will be a joint special issue with our sister journal, Small, on the topic of single atom catalysts, guest edited by Profs. Yusuke Yamauchi (University of Queensland, Australia), Manoj B. Gawande (Palacky University, Czech Republic), and Katsuhiko Ariga (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan). Another exciting special issue in 2021 will be focused on wetting-empowered surface functions for engineering applications, guest edited by Profs. Hans-Jürgen Butt (MPI Polymer Research, Germany), Ben Bin Xu (Northumbria University, UK), and Dr. Yifan Li (Northumbria University, UK). In 2021, we will continue our Hall of Fame series of invited-only review articles from the top scientists in their fields. These articles are being collected into a special virtual issue and were again among our top-cited papers in 2020. This year, we can certainly look forward to new cutting-edge contributions. Advanced Materials Interfaces will also continue publishing our article series on Biomaterials, launched last year. Given the importance and topicality of biomaterials/biointerfaces, authors are encouraged to submit either original research articles or review-type content on all topics of biomaterials, including hydrogels, tissue engineering, drug delivery, etc. Towards the end of last year, we simplified the submission and transfer processes for authors. The Advanced journal family and most of its sister journals now have a single, concise set of article types. The most notable change is the discontinuation of the article types “Communication” and “Full Paper”, which are replaced with “Research Article” and can contain original research studies of any length. More information on the article types can be found here, specifically under “Article Types”. We believe this is a significant step towards making life easier for our authors, readers, and reviewers, as it greatly reduces the need for formatting in general and reformatting after transfer to a sister journal. It also brings us one step closer to free-format submissions. This initiative is part of a global project across Wiley and you will see similar changes to Wiley's complete portfolio of journals. It underlines the efforts Wiley is undertaking to make life easier when preparing, submitting, and reading manuscripts. Finally, we would like to thank our Advisory Board members, authors, reviewers, and readers for their continuous interest as well as their support for Advanced Materials Interfaces. We hope to serve up more great publications in the upcoming year! We wish you a healthy, successful, and happy 2021! On behalf of the editorial team,