Physical Review Materials
Physical Review Materials is a trusted journal for high-quality, significant developments in materials research. It publishes multidisciplinary research across materials science, physics, chemistry and engineering.
Embracing Multidisciplinary Materials Research
Materials research has grown rapidly in recent years and increasingly transcends conventional subject boundaries. PRMaterials provides a publication and reference venue to the expanding community of physicists, materials scientists, chemists, engineers, and scientists in related disciplines, carrying out high-quality, original research in materials. PRMaterials coordinates with other members of the Physical Review journal family to serve new subspecialties as they develop. As such, PRMaterials expands the scope of Physical Review’s journals, providing an explicit focus on materials research.
PRMaterials publishes Review Articles, Research Updates, detailed Research Articles, and Letters, which are short papers of particular significance and/or topical interest. The journal has a flexible approach to article lengths and welcomes submission of longer papers that provide depth and authority in their subject areas.
By Scientists, For Scientists
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRMaterials is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This ensures that its mission, standards, and policies prioritize the needs of researchers and the broader scientific community; this commitment is reinforced by APS’s promise as a founding member of the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition.
PRMaterials covers a wide range of topics on materials research, including:
- Topological materials
- Two-dimensional materials
- Magnetic, ferroelectric, and multiferroic materials
- Superconducting materials
- Semiconducting materials
- Materials for energy harvesting, storage, and generation
- Materials for quantum technologies
- Nanomaterials, nanostructures, and nanocomposites
- Metamaterials and plasmonic, optical, and photonic materials
- Soft materials, polymers, and self-assembly
- Biomaterials
- Materials for catalysis and electrochemistry, including photocatalysis and electrocatalysis
- Electronic materials, metals, and dielectrics, including organics
- Mechanical properties, materials structure, and phase transformations
- Glasses and amorphous materials
- Prediction, synthesis, design, and modeling of materials
- Crystal growth, film growth, crystallization, and kinetics
- Thin films, interfaces, surfaces, and heterostructures
Submitted manuscripts should meet the following criteria:
- Present important results that significantly advance the field of material research.
- Generate interest for PRMaterials' readers.
- Represent an authoritative and substantive addition to the body of literature.
At the core of APS's mission is a commitment to meeting the needs of physicists, a community that has been at the leading edge of open access. As a result, APS supports a variety of sustainable access options:
- Authors can pay an article publication charge (APC) to make accepted manuscripts immediately accessible under a CC-BY (4.0 International) license. In keeping with APS's community-orientation, this is the most permissive license available and permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. APCs cover all costs and decrease the need for subscription revenue, helping to keep subscription price-per-article low (current APS APCs).
- APS makes its journals free to read at U.S. public libraries and high schools by application. Contact publisher@aps.org for more information.
- APS is a founding member of CHORUS, which enables distributed public access to published research articles reporting on U.S. federal government funded research.
- APS offers authors from lower income countries the opportunity to publish Open Access at no cost by automatically offering APC waivers for articles accepted into all Hybrid and Gold Open Access titles. Learn more here.
- APS provides free access to its subscription-based journals content for readers in lower income countries through partnerships with Research4Life and other programs. Learn more here.
Editorial Board
The PRMaterials Editorial Board is a diverse, global group of active, distinguished scientists, selected by editors in consultation with APS units and appointed by the Executive Editor. Board members serve three-year terms. They may be requested by the editors to advise at any stage of the review process and they serve as adjudicators in formal appeals.
Editorial Team
PRMaterials is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRMaterials acceptance criteria.
High Visibility and Impact
PRMaterials authors gain high visibility and achieve broad dissemination of their work in this interdisciplinary journal. PRMaterials editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
- Editors’ Suggestions: Selected papers are chosen as Editors’ Suggestions to direct readers to interesting, important, and well-written articles in areas of research beyond their usual interests. They garner, on average, more downloads and citations than other papers published in the journal and are more frequently covered by news outlets.
- Featured in Physics: Editors regularly notify Physics, APS’s daily online news and commentary publication, about important papers, resulting in coverage in the forms of Synopsis, Focus, or Viewpoint.
- Publicity: APS promotes press-worthy papers from its journals to journalists through a weekly Tip Sheet, resulting in frequent coverage in industry publications and the popular press, such as Physics World and Business Insider.
- Indexing: ISI (Science Citation Index®), Scopus, Inspec, Google Scholar
- Follow APS on Social Media:
- X: @PhysRevMaterials
- LinkedIn: @APSPhysics
- Facebook: @APSPhysics
- Instagram: @APSPhysics
- WeChat: @APSPhysics
Editorial and Publishing Policies
All journals published by APS follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRMaterials is published electronically one article at a time. Articles are identified by volume number and a six-digit article number, for example, Journal 1, XXXXXX (2020).
PRMaterials editors can decide to accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.