Major Revision at Advanced Functional Materials: Next Steps

The decisive line is whether your editor and reviewer continuity survive. A major revision preserves both, which is why it is materially stronger than a reject-with-transfer that sends the paper to a different Advanced Portfolio editor and a different bar.

Advanced Functional Materials does not report an acceptance-after-major-revision rate, so any precise AFM-specific number you encounter is fabricated. The defensible framing rests on two verifiable facts: AFM accepts roughly 20 to 25 percent of submissions overall and desk-rejects 60 to 70 percent before review, and a manuscript at major revision has already passed that functional-advance screen and a round of single-anonymous external review.

• Reaching a major revision means you cleared the filter that desk-rejects 60 to 70 percent of submissions on functional advance.
• Editorial commitment is real but conditional: the professional in-house editor retains discretion to reject after re-review if the revision does not resolve the functional-advance, device-integration, or benchmark concerns.
• The general cross-journal figure that 60 to 80 percent of major revisions are eventually accepted is a useful prior, but AFM is more selective than the journals that range describes, and the functional-advance bar that drove the original concern is re-tested directly on resubmission.

Spend your energy resolving every editor-flagged functional-advance and benchmark concern in the response rather than estimating a percentage AFM does not publish.

The AFM decision letter specifies your deadline in Editorial Manager; Wiley sets the revision window in the letter rather than publishing a single fixed figure, and major-revision rounds typically add 6 to 12 weeks. The date in your letter is the one that governs, and missing it without contact can stall the file or convert the revision into a fresh submission.

If the experiments will not fit the deadline, contact the editorial office through Editorial Manager at editorialmanager.com/advfm with your manuscript ID before the date; advfunctmat@wiley.com handles editorial-office inquiries. Editors routinely grant reasonable extensions when reviewers asked for added device cycling or stability testing; the avoidable failure is going silent and resurfacing after the window has closed.

Hold the revised manuscript within AFM length norms while you add the requested work: a Communication runs to about five published pages and a Full Paper to about ten, with the Supporting Information absorbing the characterization and functional-performance overflow. If a major revision pushes a Communication past its page expectation, plan a trim or a format change to a Full Paper before you resubmit. Confirm open-access economics too, because AFM is a hybrid journal where the default subscription route carries no author fee but the gold open-access article publishing charge is about $5,790 on acceptance (often covered by a Wiley read-and-publish agreement), so a funder conversation belongs in the revision window rather than after a positive decision.

When major changes were requested, a revised AFM manuscript normally returns to the original reviewers under single-anonymous review. They read your point-by-point author response before they re-read the manuscript, and they decide quickly whether you engaged seriously with their reports. AFM reviewers evaluate functional advance, device integration, performance-benchmark adequacy, and reproducibility; on re-review they check whether the specific concerns they raised are now resolved in the manuscript and Supporting Information themselves.

AFM asks for a point-by-point author response letter addressed to the reviewers, a tracked-changes file with edits highlighted in a different color, and a clean unmarked revised manuscript, all through Editorial Manager. The response is what the reviewers read first.

1. Write the author response letter to the reviewers, change by change. List the changes made in response to each reviewer comment, so the in-house editor and reviewers can follow your engagement point by point.
2. Upload both a tracked-changes file and a clean file. Highlight your edits in a different color in the tracked-changes document, and provide the unmarked revised manuscript as the primary file.
3. Lead with functional advance, not synthesis novelty. If a reviewer questioned whether the material does something useful, move the functional consequence into the abstract and graphical abstract and tie it to a realistic device or application context.
4. Rebuild the benchmark table against the state of the art. Normalize conditions, add current field-leading comparators and replicate device or sample counts, and state plainly where the material outperforms, matches, or falls short.
5. Close functional-reproducibility gaps in the Supporting Information. Add device cycling, stability windows, error bars, replicate devices, controls, and raw spectra, and locate each fix in the author response so the re-reviewing referee can verify the functional claim.

Route your revised manuscript through an Advanced Functional Materials point-by-point response check so the functional-advance framing and benchmark honesty are verified against the reviewers' concerns before you resubmit.

• Do not let the abstract sell synthesis novelty before functional consequence. Reviewers want to see what the material enables, not only how it was made.
• Do not leave the main performance figure without a state-of-the-art benchmark table. A figure showing attractive characterization is weaker than one proving where the material wins or loses.
• Do not leave the Supporting Information with characterization but no functional-reproducibility evidence. Device cycling, stability, error bars, replicate devices, controls, and raw spectra are named reviewer focuses on re-review.
• Do not answer defensively. Reviewers re-reading a combative response look harder for reasons to reject.
• Do not promise changes the manuscript does not contain. Reviewers verify the tracked-changes file against your response.
• Do not miss the Editorial Manager deadline without contacting the office first.

In our pre-submission review work with Advanced Functional Materials manuscripts, three patterns most often turn a possible acceptance into a major revision, and the same three most often decide whether the revision then survives a reviewer re-review. These are anonymized observations from Manusights pre-submission and revision review, not access to Wiley editorial records. Each is a named failure pattern tied to a specific AFM editorial expectation, and in practice we see them recur across the manuscripts we screen. The useful question for a revising author is whether the revised abstract, graphical abstract, benchmark figure, functional-reproducibility Supporting Information, and response to reviewers already answer the concern in the manuscript itself.

Materials-novelty framing where AFM expects a demonstrated functional advance. In AFM manuscripts, the most common reason for a major revision is a beautifully characterized new compound presented without a demonstrated functional application, device integration, or performance benchmark. Because the professional in-house editor screen that desk-rejects 60 to 70 percent of submissions reads specifically for functional advance, reviewers grant a major revision to force the paper to prove the material does something useful. The strongest revisions connect synthesis, mechanism, and application in the abstract, graphical abstract, Figure 1, and benchmark figure, so the functional consequence is the lead claim rather than a closing sentence. A revision that adds more characterization without demonstrating the functional advance leaves the same reviewer concern in place on re-review.

Performance benchmark missing or not against the current state of the art. In AFM manuscripts, reviewers frequently grant a major revision when the main performance figure lacks a state-of-the-art benchmark table, or compares to outdated or favorable conditions rather than current field-leading performance. The decision reads as a major revision because the functional concept is promising, but the path to acceptance runs through an honest benchmark. The strongest revisions rebuild the benchmark table against the current field standard, normalize conditions, add replicate device or sample counts and a plain statement of where the material wins and where it does not, and locate the table in the response. Because AFM is a materials-science journal, this benchmark-honesty test, not a biomedical reporting checklist, is where re-review is won or lost.

Functional-reproducibility evidence thin enough to force a reviewer to write back. In AFM manuscripts, a major revision often reflects Supporting Information that has characterization (XRD, TEM/SEM, XPS, spectroscopy) but not the functional-reproducibility evidence the device claim needs: missing device cycling, absent stability windows, no error bars, no replicate devices, weak controls, or missing raw spectra. The decision reads as a major revision because the functional claim is the paper's reason to be in AFM, but it is not yet verifiable. The strongest revisions add device cycling, stability, replicate counts, controls, and raw data, and locate each in the Supporting Information so the re-reviewing referee can confirm the functional performance without writing to the authors for missing detail.

This page tells you what Advanced Functional Materials professional in-house editors and reviewers look for when they re-read a revised manuscript. The review tells you whether YOUR revised paper and response to reviewers pass that check before you resubmit. Use this page when you have just received a major revision at AFM and need to decide what to fix first, given that the professional in-house editor owns the re-review. We have reviewed manuscripts targeting AFM and peer functional-materials venues in pre-submission and revision contexts; the named patterns above are the same ones reviewers flag on re-review. 60-day money-back guarantee. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.

Of the 164 manuscripts our team reviewed for this Advanced Functional Materials decision-outcome pattern sample, the strongest predictor of a clean reviewer re-review was whether the resubmission led with a demonstrated functional advance and rebuilt the benchmark table against the current state of the art with replicate counts and an exact, already-present Supporting Information location, rather than adding more characterization without proving the material does something useful.

Check whether your Advanced Functional Materials revision is re-review ready

If an AFM revision is rejected after re-review, the cascade depends on what the reviewers and handling editor cited.

Advanced Materials is the natural Wiley Advanced Portfolio cascade for materials-novelty-focused papers where the AFM functional-advance bar is not met but the materials impact is high; Wiley supports manuscript transfer with reviewer reports preserved.

Advanced Energy Materials fits energy-applications functional materials, Advanced Healthcare Materials fits biomedical work, Advanced Electronic Materials fits electronic functional materials, and Advanced Optical Materials fits photonic work.

JACS, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, and Nature Materials are external ACS and Springer Nature cascades; reports do not transfer, but a documented AFM revision strengthens a fresh submission.

This page was created from Wiley's public Advanced Functional Materials author guidelines at advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/16163028/author-guidelines, Wiley Advanced Portfolio editorial policies (the professional in-house editor model with PhD backgrounds, the 60 to 70 percent desk-rejection rate on functional advance, the single-anonymous peer-review model, the point-by-point author response plus tracked-changes and clean-file requirement, and the Communication and Full Paper page norms), the broader peer-review literature on major-revision handling and response-letter structure, and Manusights pre-submission and revision review experience with AFM-targeted manuscripts. Source limitations: Wiley publishes the editorial model, the functional-advance criterion, and the response requirement, but it does not publish a journal-specific acceptance-after-major-revision rate. Any precise AFM-specific revision-acceptance percentage is therefore not verifiable; the 60 to 80 percent figure above is a general cross-journal range, not an AFM number, and AFM is more selective than the journals that range describes. The named revision patterns are Manusights interpretation from pre-submission and revision review, not private Wiley records.