Advanced Materials Submission Process

Wiley's administrative screen is where avoidable package problems slow a strong paper. Check authorship order, CRediT author contributions, competing interest declarations, funding statements, ethics or animal-use approvals where relevant, data availability wording, AI-use disclosure, and Supporting Information labels before upload. Materials papers should also make compound or material composition clear in the main text or Supporting Information, especially when proprietary mixtures, crystal data, device architectures, or generated images could create reproducibility questions.

After the office check, an Advanced Materials editor evaluates the title, abstract, cover letter, Figure 1, mechanism figure, and Supporting Information map. The practical question is whether the manuscript is a broad materials-science advance or a strong specialty paper for a different Advanced Portfolio journal. This is where a Wiley transfer suggestion can be a useful signal rather than a failure.

Manuscripts that pass the screen usually go to 2 to 3 reviewers under single-blind peer review. The reviewers test novelty, characterization depth, mechanism, reproducibility, controls, comparison against current materials, and whether the claims survive outside the best-case application. A technically strong paper can still struggle if the generalizable design principle is not visible.

The decision can be accept, minor revision, major revision, reject, or transfer. Treat a transfer recommendation as a routing diagnosis: Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Science, Small, Advanced Healthcare Materials, and related Wiley titles often preserve context when the paper is good but the Advanced Materials breadth case is incomplete.

Advanced Materials does not impose strict word or figure limits, but content should justify the length. A typical Research Article includes:

• 3,000 to 8,000 words

• 3 to 8 display items (figures, schemes, or tables)

• supporting information with additional data and methods

Communications (shorter, more focused) are also accepted and follow similar submission procedures.

Access the Wiley submission portal for Advanced Materials. Select the article type: Research Article, Communication, Review, Progress Report, or Essay.

Provide the title, abstract, keywords, and complete author list with affiliations. Co-author email addresses are required so they receive notification of the submission and peer review outcomes.

The cover letter matters at Advanced Materials. In-house editors use it alongside the abstract to make the triage decision. The letter should:

• state the main finding in one or two sentences

• explain why the result represents a genuine advance in materials science

• identify the broad audience that will benefit

• distinguish the work from recent publications in the field

Avoid generic statements about novelty. Explain specifically what makes the materials science advance meaningful beyond your immediate subfield.

Upload the manuscript file and all figures. Figures should be high resolution and publication-ready. The journal has specific figure formatting guidelines for accepted manuscripts, but initial submissions can use standard quality.

Supporting information goes as a separate document. This includes detailed experimental methods, additional characterization data, computational details, and extended figures or tables not in the main manuscript.

Author contributions (CRediT), competing interests, data availability, and funding declarations. Generative AI use must also be declared per Wiley's current policies.

Preview the submission and submit. The confirmation email confirms receipt.

Advanced Materials uses professional in-house editors who specialize in materials science. The editorial screen is fast and selective.

Editors evaluate:

• is the advance genuinely novel, or is it an incremental improvement?

• does the result matter across materials science, or only within one narrow specialty?

• is the quality of the materials characterization sufficient?

• are the claims supported by the data?

• is this a complete story, or a preliminary result that needs more work?

The desk rejection rate is high. Advanced Materials is among the most selective materials science journals. Papers that do not clearly demonstrate broad impact are returned quickly, often with a suggestion to submit to a sister journal (Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, etc.).

Papers that pass triage go to 2 to 3 expert reviewers. Advanced Materials uses single-anonymous review.

Reviewers evaluate:

• novelty and originality of the materials science

• quality and thoroughness of characterization

• whether the results represent a real advance over existing materials or approaches

• reproducibility and methodological rigor

• clarity of presentation and data quality

First decisions after review typically arrive in 3 to 6 weeks. Total time from submission to first decision is 4 to 8 weeks.

• Accept: rare on first round. Usually after revision.

• Minor revision: small changes. Respond promptly.

• Major revision: substantive concerns. The revised paper returns to reviewers.

• Reject: the paper does not meet the journal's novelty or impact threshold.

• Transfer: editors may suggest a Wiley sister journal. This is common and not a negative judgment on the science. Transfers preserve reviewer context.

Advanced Materials editors frequently suggest transfers to:

• Advanced Functional Materials: strong functional materials work that is excellent but below the novelty threshold for Advanced Materials

• Advanced Energy Materials: energy-focused work

• Advanced Science: broader science scope

• Small: nanoscale-focused studies

Accepting a transfer is often faster than starting a new submission elsewhere because reviewer reports travel with the manuscript.

"This work presents a novel approach to..." is not a novelty argument. "This is the first demonstration of the specific property in [material class], which enables the specific application that was previously impossible because [reason]" is.

Check whether your Advanced Materials novelty claim is specific enough →

Advanced Materials looks for step changes, not incremental improvements. Showing a 5% improvement in a known material's property is unlikely to pass triage. Showing a new material with fundamentally different behavior, or a new fabrication approach with broad applicability, is what editors want.

Check whether your Advanced Materials advance is broad enough →

Reviewers expect thorough characterization: structural, compositional, morphological, and functional. A paper that reports an interesting property but does not fully characterize the material leaves too many questions for a journal at this level.

Check whether your Advanced Materials characterization package is complete →

When editors suggest a Wiley sister journal, the transfer process preserves your reviewer reports and editorial context. Ignoring the suggestion and submitting cold to a new journal means starting from scratch.

Across materials-science manuscripts targeting Advanced Materials, the biggest submission-process risks are not merely Wiley portal mistakes. They are mismatches between the cross-field claim and the evidence package that the editor sees through the title, abstract, cover letter, figures, characterization, Supporting Information, references, and suggested routing inside the Advanced Portfolio. Advanced Materials publishes work for a broad materials audience, so a technically strong specialty paper still has to prove why the result travels beyond its immediate application area.

These named failure patterns come from Manusights internal analysis of materials submissions and official-source review of Advanced Materials, Wiley, and Advanced Portfolio author guidance. The review tells you whether your paper passes the Advanced Materials-specific readiness checks that official instructions cannot evaluate from a generic Wiley checklist. Full Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts.

We see this most clearly when the same Advanced Materials manuscript looks complete in the Wiley portal but the cover letter, Figure 1, characterization package, and Supporting Information still leave the broad materials claim under-explained.

• Broad-impact framing is claimed in the cover letter but not proven in the figures.

• Advanced Portfolio fit is real, but Advanced Materials fit is not proven.

• Characterization is extensive but the design principle remains under-proven.

Pattern 1: Broad-impact framing is claimed in the cover letter but not proven in the figures

Broad-impact framing not proven in the figures.

Across materials-science manuscripts targeting Advanced Materials, the most common high-value failure is a cover letter that promises broad materials impact while the manuscript figures prove only a narrow performance improvement. The abstract says the work advances materials design, the cover letter says the result is significant across the field, and the conclusion gestures toward a platform. But the figure set mostly shows incremental efficiency, stability, conductivity, mechanical strength, catalytic activity, sensing response, or biocompatibility under one application context.

The vulnerable components are the title, abstract, graphical figure, cover letter, first figure, mechanism figure, stability data, controls, references, and Supporting Information. Advanced Materials needs more than a high metric. The paper should show a design principle, structure-property relationship, mechanism, generalizable fabrication strategy, or materials concept that a reader outside the immediate subfield can use.

If the strongest evidence is a benchmark table with slightly better numbers, the editor may see a better fit for Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Science, Small, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, or a discipline-specific journal.

Before upload, test whether each main figure supports the cross-field claim. Figure 1 should orient a broad materials reader. The mechanism or structure-property figure should explain why the advance is not only a device result. The references should show the exact boundary being moved. The cover letter should not merely repeat "broad impact"; it should name the materials communities affected and the evidence that makes the advance portable.

Check whether your Advanced Materials manuscript clears the cross-field impact check

Pattern 2: The manuscript belongs in the Advanced Portfolio, but not necessarily Advanced Materials

Advanced Portfolio fit is real, but Advanced Materials fit is not proven.

Across materials-science manuscripts targeting Advanced Materials, the second pattern is a paper that is legitimately strong but aimed at the wrong point in the Advanced Portfolio. Wiley's Advanced Portfolio includes venues with overlapping prestige but different audience promises. Advanced Functional Materials can be a stronger home for function-centered materials work, Advanced Energy Materials for energy-conversion or storage manuscripts, Advanced Science for broad interdisciplinary open-access work, Small for nanoscale materials, and Advanced Healthcare Materials or Advanced Optical Materials for application-specific audiences.

The components that reveal the routing problem are the cover letter, scope paragraph, keywords, references, application framing, figure hierarchy, and transfer alternatives. A manuscript on batteries may have excellent electrochemical data but no materials principle beyond one device class. A biomaterials paper may have strong in vitro and in vivo evidence but speak mainly to therapeutic translation. A nanomaterials paper may have elegant morphology control but limited cross-field relevance. These papers are not weak.

They are often weakened by forcing the Advanced Materials claim when the evidence, audience, and likely reviewer pool point elsewhere.

The practical pre-upload question is not "Is this good enough for an impact-factor target?" It is "Would an Advanced Materials editor see this as important to materials scientists outside the subfield after reading the abstract, cover letter, Figure 1, and conclusion?" If the answer is no, the page should help authors redirect before a desk decision. A cleaner initial target can preserve reviewer momentum, reduce transfer delay, and make the cover letter more honest.

Check whether your Advanced Materials manuscript clears the Advanced Portfolio routing check

Pattern 3: Characterization is extensive but does not establish the design principle

Characterization is extensive but the design principle remains under-proven.

Across materials-science manuscripts targeting Advanced Materials, the third pattern is a dense characterization package that answers many local questions but leaves the main design principle under-proven. The manuscript may include SEM, TEM, XRD, XPS, Raman, AFM, FTIR, mechanical testing, electrical measurements, device cycling, stability assays, biological validation, modeling, and supplementary controls. Yet the abstract claims a general materials strategy that the figures and Supporting Information do not fully establish.

The gap usually appears when the evidence package proves that one material works but not why it works, where it stops working, or how the principle transfers. Advanced Materials submissions need characterization that connects composition, structure, processing, morphology, interface behavior, function, and reproducibility. A single high-performing sample is vulnerable if batch variation, control materials, failure modes, long-term stability, scale-up limits, or mechanistic alternatives are missing.

The Supporting Information should not be a warehouse of extra data. It should answer the objections that a broad materials reviewer will raise after seeing the main figures.

Before upload, map the central claim to the characterization set. If the claim is about a new design rule, the controls should compare designs. If it is about stability, the methods and figures should show stress conditions and failure behavior. If it is about broad applicability, the supplementary experiments should show boundaries across materials, devices, or environments. Otherwise Advanced Materials, Nature Materials, Materials Horizons, Advanced Functional Materials, or ACS Nano editors may see a strong dataset that has not yet become a broad materials story.

Check whether your Advanced Materials manuscript is submission-ready

This guide uses Wiley's Advanced Materials author guidance, Wiley submission and data-sharing guidance, Advanced Portfolio scope context, journal metrics, and Manusights review patterns from materials chemistry, nanomaterials, biomaterials, energy materials, and device manuscripts. We reviewed 100 recent published Advanced Materials papers, then compared those published packages with recent Manusights work reviews from authors deciding between Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Advanced Science, Small, and Nature Materials.

Source limitations: Wiley can update portal steps, file requirements, data availability rules, transfer workflows, and Advanced Portfolio policies after this review date, so authors should verify final administrative details against the official Wiley author pages before upload. Use this guide for the decision the portal cannot answer: whether the manuscript is broad enough for Advanced Materials or should route to a sister journal first.