Advanced Composites Letters

About Advanced Composites Letters

Advanced Composites Letters — Full Journal Profile

Advanced Composites Letters is a journal in composite materials science and engineering, devoted — as its title announces — to relatively short, focused communications on composite materials and composite structures. It is identified by print ISSN 0963-6935 and online ISSN 2633-366X, the pair carried on this JournalsWorld record and in its record in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). For most of its life it was published in the United Kingdom by Adcotec Ltd; in its open access period it was published by SAGE Publishing, which is the publisher named in its DOAJ record, and DOAJ records that record as replaced by a successor ISSN, 2634-9833 — the identifier of SAGE's Composites and Advanced Materials, the title under which this journal's line of publishing continued from 2021.

That history makes this profile do two jobs at once. It must describe Advanced Composites Letters accurately in its own right — its scope in composite materials and structures, its review and open access arrangements in its SAGE period, its place in the Scopus-based record — and it must point readers and authors who arrive under the old title towards the successor title where the conversation now continues. Confusing the two, in either direction, corrupts citations and submission plans alike, so the relationship between them is set out plainly at the start and returned to throughout.

Quick facts

The two publisher entries in this table are not a mistake, and the difference between them is one of the structured-field points a careful reader should notice. DOAJ, recording the journal in its open access period, names SAGE Publishing in the United Kingdom. SCImago's record, built on Scopus coverage that runs from the mid-1990s to 2020, names Adcotec Ltd as publisher. Both are correct for the periods they describe: the journal was an Adcotec title for most of its life and a SAGE title in its final, open access phase. Any single-line summary that gives only one publisher, without a date, is incomplete, and citation or catalogue work should follow the publisher of the specific volume being cited.

Identity and disambiguation

Composite materials is a field with a dense thicket of similar journal titles, and at least three neighbours must be kept apart from this one. Advanced Composite Materials is a bimonthly Taylor & Francis journal associated with the Japanese and Korean composite materials societies, with ISSNs 0924-3046 and 1568-5519; it is not this journal. Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials is a Springer journal founded in 2018, with ISSNs 2522-0128 and 2522-0136; it is not this journal either, despite sharing two title words and a subject. And the successor title, Composites and Advanced Materials (online ISSN 2634-9833), is the continuation of this journal's own line under a new name from 2021 — related, but a distinct bibliographic title with its own ISSN, to be cited under its own name for articles published under it.

The reliable identifiers for Advanced Composites Letters itself are print ISSN 0963-6935 and online ISSN 2633-366X; in the SAGE period its DOIs take the form 10.1177/2633366X followed by an article number, with the online ISSN embedded in the prefix string, as in the worked example preserved in the DOAJ record. An article in a reference list with the abbreviation Adv. Compos. Lett., a year up to 2020, and one of those ISSNs or DOI forms belongs here. An otherwise similar citation dated 2021 or later, with ISSN 2634-9833, belongs to the successor title and should be recorded as such, not silently rewritten into the old title and not silently left as if the old title had published it.

Cataloguers should also note what the online ISSN tells the chronology. The 2633-366X online ISSN belongs to the journal's late, digital open access phase; the print ISSN 0963-6935 reaches back to its long print life under Adcotec. A record carrying only the print ISSN is likely describing the earlier decades; a record carrying the online ISSN is describing the SAGE-period journal. Both describe the same title, and the ISSN-L logic that links a title's media editions applies here just as it does elsewhere — but the successor, having a new title and a new ISSN, is a new bibliographic entity, however continuous its editorial line may be.

History and the move to open access and a successor title

SCImago-derived listings record Scopus coverage of the journal from 1995 to 2020, which places it as an established specialist title of the 1990s composites literature, published from the United Kingdom by Adcotec Ltd. The letters format in its title reflects a publishing model of that era: shorter communications, reporting new results on composite materials and structures more quickly and compactly than full-length papers in the field's larger journals. For a quarter of a century, that was the journal's place in the ecosystem — a venue where a focused experimental or analytical result on a laminate, a fibre system, a manufacturing route or a structural application could be put on record.

Two linked changes close the journal's own story. First, in 2019, as recorded by DOAJ, the journal began publishing in open access, by then under SAGE Publishing, with the open access apparatus DOAJ documents: stated peer review, article charges with waivers, Creative Commons licensing and DOI assignment. Second, DOAJ records this title as replaced by ISSN 2634-9833, and articles from 2021 onwards appear under the successor title Composites and Advanced Materials — SAGE's continuation of the line, whose articles carry DOIs in the 10.1177/26349833 series. The Scopus coverage end date of 2020 for the old title aligns with that transition. Readers should therefore treat Advanced Composites Letters as a title whose own run ends at that point, with its subject, its publisher and its readership carried forward under the new name.

Title changes of this kind are common in journal publishing and carry no automatic implication about quality in either direction. They do, however, split a journal's bibliographic record: metrics, indexing and citation counts accumulate separately under each title and ISSN, which is why a successor's present-day figures must never be quoted as the old title's figures, and why this profile reports the old title's SCImago-derived indicators with their years attached and its successor's existence as a separate, linked fact.

Scope in detail

DOAJ records the journal's keywords simply as composite materials and composite structures, and classifies it under materials of engineering and construction and mechanics of materials. Those few words cover a wide and well-defined engineering territory, whose main strands are worth spelling out for authors and readers alike.

Composite materials

The materials strand covers fibre-reinforced polymers and other matrix systems — glass, carbon, aramid and natural fibre reinforcements; thermoset and thermoplastic matrices; ceramic and metal matrix composites — and the study of their composition, processing, microstructure and properties. Work in this strand includes the mechanical characterisation of new material systems, the effects of fibre treatment and filler addition on strength, stiffness, toughness and wear, thermal and dielectric behaviour, and the interface between fibre and matrix, which so often governs whether a composite performs as its constituents promise. The letters format suited exactly this kind of report: a well-defined material, a clear test programme, a result other materials scientists could use.

Composite structures

The structures strand moves from coupon to component: laminates and sandwich structures, joints, beams, panels, shells and complete structural elements, their analysis, testing and failure. Finite element modelling, buckling and impact behaviour, fatigue, damage tolerance and repair all sit here, as does the autoclave and manufacturing science that determines whether a designed structure can actually be made with the properties the design assumes. The journal's scope joins the two strands deliberately — a structure paper may depend on a materials result, and a materials paper earns its place partly through the structures it enables — and readers of the archive will find that dialogue running through its volumes.

Manufacturing, testing and standards-based characterisation

Across both strands, method is central. Composite results are only as transferable as their manufacturing and testing records: lay-up, curing cycle, fibre volume fraction, void content, specimen geometry and the testing standard followed, whether for tensile, flexural, impact, erosion or thermal measurements. Papers in this journal's tradition report those elements so that other laboratories can reproduce and compare. A reader reusing a numerical result from the archive — a tensile strength, a conductivity, a wear rate — should carry its material specification and test conditions with it into the new context; a composite property quoted without its system and method is only half a fact.

Applications

The applications that recur in this field — aerospace and automotive structures, construction, marine and industrial components, electronic packaging, grinding and tooling products, sustainable composites using natural fibres and fillers — form the outward face of the scope. The successor title's early volumes, continuous with this journal's line, show the same spread, from natural-fibre polymer composites to hybrid composite grinding wheels and short-carbon-fibre aluminium for electronic packaging. Application papers are strongest in this tradition when the application disciplines the science: a defined service requirement, a material or structure designed against it, and test evidence that the requirement is met.

Peer review, open access terms and editorial practice in the SAGE period

For its open access period, DOAJ records single anonymous peer review, plagiarism screening, an editorial board presented on the SAGE Journals platform under the title code ACM, author instructions maintained there, and an average of about fifteen weeks from submission to publication. Those arrangements describe the journal as SAGE operated it from 2019; they should not be projected backwards onto the Adcotec decades, whose review and production arrangements are a matter for the volumes themselves, nor forwards onto the successor title, whose current arrangements must be read on its own SAGE pages.

Licensing in the open access period was Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution–NonCommercial — CC BY or CC BY-NC in the DOAJ record — with authors not retaining unrestricted copyright and publishing rights. As with every journal that has applied more than one Creative Commons variant, the licence printed on the individual article governs its reuse; a reader who needs to reproduce a figure from a 2020 article in a commercial work should check that article's own licence statement rather than relying on this summary. The recorded article processing charge for the open access period, up to 2,000 US dollars with a waiver policy, likewise belongs to that period: it explains how the SAGE-period journal financed reader-free access, and it is not a statement about the successor title's present charges, which authors must check on the successor's own author pages.

DOAJ records no preservation service for this title in its open access record — its preservation field is empty where comparable SAGE titles list one — so readers seeking a SAGE-period article should work through the DOI and the publisher's platform, and readers seeking Adcotec-period articles should expect the library and indexing route: the Scopus-indexed back file, interlibrary holdings of the print ISSN, and the citations that lead from later work back to the letters themselves. Where a sought article could not be verified through either route, this profile says so rather than implying a completeness the record does not support.

Metrics and indexing, stated carefully

The journal was covered by Scopus, on the SCImago evidence, from 1995 to 2020, categorised in ceramics and composites and in industrial and manufacturing engineering. SCImago-derived listings give it an h-index of 28 in the 2023 data, with an SJR value of 0.370 for 2023 in the same derived series, following 0.344 for 2022. Those figures are quoted here with their provider and years attached because that is the only honest way to quote them: they are a historical journal's indicators in a Scopus-based system, computed after its own run had ended, reflecting citations still accruing to its back file. They are not a Journal Impact Factor, they are not the successor title's figures, and they should not be averaged, merged or otherwise combined with the figures of Advanced Composite Materials or Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials, whose similar names make such errors easy and whose records are entirely separate.

For formal evaluation purposes, the correct procedure is the one this profile has followed: take the indicator from the provider's own system, for the exact ISSN, with the year recorded. An evaluator who finds a very different number attached to this title on an aggregator site should ask which title and which year that number actually describes before using it; in this crowded corner of materials publishing, misattribution is the rule wherever ISSNs are not checked.

For authors and readers today

Authors with a composite materials or composite structures manuscript should not plan a submission to Advanced Composites Letters as a current title; the line continues as Composites and Advanced Materials at SAGE, whose current aims, scope, charges and submission system, read on the publisher's own pages for ISSN 2634-9833, are the operative facts for a new submission. Authors should satisfy themselves, as with any renamed journal, that the successor's scope still matches their paper — in this case the continuity of subject is close, since the successor grew directly out of this title — and should cite their own and others' earlier work in the old title under its correct name and ISSN.

Readers and citing authors can use the Advanced Composites Letters archive with confidence proportionate to its record: a peer-reviewed specialist back file of twenty-five years, Scopus-covered to 2020, whose materials data and structural results continue to be cited. Cite it as Adv. Compos. Lett. with the correct year, volume and DOI or pages; do not update its name to the successor's in a reference, because the article was not published under that name; and when a result matters to a design or a safety-relevant decision, return to the full text and its test conditions rather than relying on an abstract or a secondary quotation.

Frequently asked questions

What are its ISSNs? Print 0963-6935 and online 2633-366X.

Who published it? Adcotec Ltd in the United Kingdom for most of its life; SAGE Publishing in the United Kingdom in its open access period from 2019, as recorded by DOAJ. The difference between directory records reflects that change of publisher, not an error to be averaged away.

Is it still the current title? DOAJ records it as replaced by ISSN 2634-9833, Composites and Advanced Materials (SAGE), under which articles appear from 2021. Scopus coverage of the old title is recorded to 2020.

Is it the same as Advanced Composite Materials? No. That is a Taylor & Francis title with ISSNs 0924-3046 and 1568-5519. Nor is it Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials, a Springer title with ISSNs 2522-0128 and 2522-0136.

Was it open access and peer reviewed? In its final period, yes: open access from 2019 under CC BY or CC BY-NC, with single anonymous peer review and plagiarism screening, as recorded by DOAJ. Its earlier decades were conventionally published under Adcotec.

What were its charges? DOAJ records up to 2,000 USD with a waiver policy, for the open access period. The successor title's current charges are a separate matter, stated on its own SAGE pages.

What subjects did it cover? Composite materials and composite structures — their composition, manufacture, properties, analysis, testing and applications — classified under materials of engineering and mechanics of materials.

Sources and verification note

This profile is based on the journal's DOAJ record — ISSNs, SAGE Publishing as publisher, United Kingdom, English language, subject classification and keywords, single anonymous review, plagiarism screening, fifteen-week publication time, open access from 2019, CC BY and CC BY-NC licensing, recorded charges and waiver policy, DOI provision, and the record's statement that the title is replaced by ISSN 2634-9833 — on SCImago-derived listings of the Scopus record, which give Adcotec Ltd as publisher, coverage 1995–2020, and the h-index and SJR figures quoted with their years, on the SAGE platform addresses and worked DOI example preserved in the DOAJ record, on evidence that articles from 2021 under ISSN 2634-9833 appear as Composites and Advanced Materials, and on this JournalsWorld record, whose ISSN pair agrees with the DOAJ record. The publisher difference between the DOAJ and SCImago records is reported openly above as a period difference, Adcotec then SAGE, rather than concealed. Where a detail could not be verified from those sources, it has been left out or described as not published, not publicly disclosed, or could not be verified.