Advanced Materials Submission Guide: Requirements, Formatting and What Editors Want

Advanced Materials is published by Wiley and covers all areas of materials science: electronic materials, polymers, biomaterials, ceramics, nanomaterials, photovoltaics, composites, and more. The 2024 JIF is 26.8 (JCR 2024), ranked 10th in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary. Getting published here means making the case for a genuine conceptual advance, not just characterizing a new material.

What the journal publishes

Advanced Materials welcomes work across:

• Electronic and photonic materials: Semiconductors, OLEDs, photovoltaics, displays, memory devices
• Energy materials: Batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells, thermoelectrics, hydrogen storage
• Biomedical materials: Drug delivery, tissue engineering, biosensors, implants
• Structural materials: High-performance polymers, composites, fibers
• Functional nanomaterials: Nanoparticles, 2D materials, nanowires, MOFs with function
• Soft matter: Hydrogels, colloids, liquid crystals with application

What it doesn't publish: incremental improvements to existing material systems without new conceptual insight, synthesis-only papers without property-function understanding, or work that belongs in a narrower specialty journal without a reason to be in a general materials venue.

Article types

Most authors submit either a Communication or a Research Article. The difference isn't just length: Communications are expected to represent a breakthrough finding that should be communicated immediately. Research Articles can be broader studies that build the full case systematically.

Submission through ScholarOne

Advanced Materials uses Wiley's ScholarOne system. Key steps:

1. Manuscript file: MS Word (.docx) or LaTeX. Figures embedded or as separate files.
2. Cover letter: Critical. Editors read this before the paper.
3. Graphical table of contents (TOC) entry: Required. One image (8.5 x 8.5 cm at 300 dpi minimum) plus a 2-3 sentence summary statement. This appears in the digital table of contents and on social media.
4. Supporting information: Separate PDF containing detailed experimental methods, supplementary characterization, full spectra, and additional figures.
5. Conflict of interest statement: Required.
6. Data availability statement: Required.

Formatting requirements

Text: No specific word limit, but Communications are strictly 6 journal pages. Editors measure this, so overlong Communications get returned before review.

Abstract: 250 words maximum for Research Articles and Communications. No subheadings. Must be accessible to a general materials science audience.

Keywords: 6-10 terms. Include material class, property/function, and application.

References: Author-Year format (e.g., Smith et al., 2024). Advanced Materials uses a numbered reference format in the published version; your manuscript can use either during review.

Figures: High-resolution (300 dpi minimum for halftones, 1000 dpi for line art). Each figure needs a standalone caption. Figures are expected to tell the story visually -- Advanced Materials figures are known for their quality.

Experimental section: Brief in the main text, comprehensive in Supporting Information. Methods in the main text should be readable but not exhaustive. Supporting Information is where reviewers look for full protocols, detailed synthesis, full spectra, and characterization data.

The cover letter

Your cover letter is the first editorial impression of your paper. At a journal where most papers are desk-rejected, it determines whether an editor reads far enough to find out.

What to include:

1. The conceptual question your paper answers (not the technique you used)
2. The key result and why it's a conceptual advance over existing work
3. The specific published papers your work goes beyond (name them)
4. Why Advanced Materials' readership -- not a specialist journal's readership -- needs to see this

What not to include: generic statements about fitting the journal's scope, lists of techniques used, or any version of "this work has never been done before" without naming the prior work.

Passing the desk

Advanced Materials' desk rejection rate is roughly 70-80%. The editors who make these decisions are experienced materials scientists. They know the field and can spot incremental work quickly.

Papers that pass the desk show:

A conceptual advance, not just new data. There's a difference between "we made a better solar cell" and "we discovered why grain boundary passivation by this class of molecule improves efficiency, and showed a design rule that generalizes to other perovskite compositions." The second is a conceptual advance.

Breadth of interest. Advanced Materials readers work across the whole materials spectrum. Your paper needs to be interesting to someone working in a different area. A paper on OLEDs should have a finding relevant to a biomaterials researcher's thinking about organic electronic interfaces, even if they won't apply it directly.

Complete data. Don't submit a half-finished story. Advanced Materials reviewers will ask for all the characterization anyway, and editors can see when key measurements are missing.

What reviewers assess

Advanced Materials reviewers evaluate:

• Novelty relative to the current literature (reviewers will cite specific papers)
• Completeness of characterization (is the material fully described?)
• Mechanism (is there understanding, not just observation?)
• State-of-the-art comparison (do your device metrics benchmark against the best published results?)
• Reproducibility of reported data (are error bars present? multiple replicates?)
• Figure quality and data presentation

Reviewers write detailed reports. Expect 5-10 specific points per reviewer, including requests for additional experiments or characterization. "Minor revision" at Advanced Materials often means 3-5 additional experiments.

After rejection: where to go next

Advanced Materials editors sometimes suggest alternatives. If they mention Advanced Functional Materials, Small, or Advanced Science, those aren't consolation prizes: they're appropriate venues for the work. Consider them seriously.

If no suggestion is made, common alternatives by area:

• Energy materials: Advanced Energy Materials (JIF 24.4, Wiley)
• Nanoscale work: ACS Nano (JIF 15.8) or Nano Letters (JIF 9.6)
• Functional materials: Advanced Functional Materials (JIF 18.5, Wiley)
• Biomaterials: Biomaterials (JIF 14.5, Elsevier)

For the full journal overview, see the Advanced Materials journal page. For review timeline expectations, see Advanced Materials review time. Our pre-submission manuscript review covers desk rejection risk and reviewer readiness for high-impact journals.

Impact factor source: Clarivate Journal Citation Reports, JCR 2024.