Advanced Science Letters

Overview

Advanced Science Letters was a multidisciplinary journal published by American Scientific Publishers (ASP) of Valencia, California, USA. It carried the print ISSN 1936-6612 and the online ISSN 1936-7317, began publication in 2010, and was discontinued — removed from Scopus in 2018 for "Publication Concerns" with final coverage of 2017, Volume 23. The journal is not active: there is no current call for papers, no functioning submission system, and no new content being published. This profile documents it as a historical record for the benefit of researchers who published in it, librarians cataloging its backfile, and evaluators assessing papers from its run.

The journal's defining feature — and the source of much confusion about it — was its publication model. Advanced Science Letters did not publish general research articles submitted by individual authors. Instead, it published conference proceedings: special issues and volumes composed of papers from international scientific, technical, and medical conferences, across ten broad disciplinary areas. Understanding this proceedings-only model is essential, because the journal is frequently mischaracterized — both by those who treat it as a conventional journal and by those who dismiss its content without understanding what it actually was.

This profile sets out the verifiable facts — identity, publisher, history, scope, indexing rise and fall, and current status — and flags what could not be confirmed, in keeping with a strict no-fabrication standard.

Identity and bibliographic details

The journal's full title is Advanced Science Letters. Its print ISSN is 1936-6612 and its online ISSN (eISSN) is 1936-7317. It was published in the United States, in English, by American Scientific Publishers. Secondary bibliographic sources record its publication history as 2010–2017, with one directory marking the title "cancelled" after 2017. Scopus's discontinued-titles list records final coverage as 2017, Volume 23, Issue 11, pages 11629–11633 — the enormous page numbers reflecting the journal's high-volume proceedings model, in which a single "issue" could contain thousands of pages of conference papers.

The journal's scope, as stated in its own instructions for authors, was "multidisciplinary" with "very wide-ranging coverage," consolidating fundamental and applied research by publishing proceedings from international conferences in ten areas: (1) Physical Sciences, (2) Engineering, (3) Biological Sciences/Health Sciences, (4) Medicine, (5) Computer and Information Sciences, (6) Mathematical Sciences, (7) Agriculture Science and Engineering, (8) Geosciences, (9) Energy/Fuels/Environmental/Green Science and Engineering, and (10) Education, Social Sciences and Public Policies. The instructions stated explicitly: "This journal does not publish general research articles by individual authors."

Beyond proceedings papers, the journal's special-sections policy allowed it to publish scientific news and views, reports, commentary, technical comments, research highlights, science and technology features and perspectives, business items, book reviews, and job notices, at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief, regional editors, and associate editors. In practice, however, the overwhelming bulk of its content was conference proceedings.

Publisher: American Scientific Publishers

Advanced Science Letters was published by American Scientific Publishers (ASP), the Valencia, California-based independent science publisher headed by Prof. Dr. Hari Singh Nalwa. ASP built its reputation in the 2000s on nanotechnology titles — the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, the Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience — and then expanded aggressively into multidisciplinary and letters journals, including Advanced Science Letters, Science of Advanced Materials, Materials Express, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters, and Advanced Science, Engineering and Medicine.

The publisher's instructions-for-authors documents for its journals reveal a publisher exercising tight, centralized control over its titles — including notably severe manuscript-withdrawal penalties (hundreds of dollars per page) and explicit disclaimers that the publisher had "no control whatsoever" over abstracting and indexing of its journals in databases such as Scopus or Web of Science and took no responsibility for coverage. These policies, published on aspbs.com, are part of the documented record of how ASP operated, and they help explain the publisher's later difficulties: authors and institutions grew wary of terms they considered punitive, and indexers grew wary of quality control.

ASP's journal program contracted sharply around 2019–2020. Its websites went dark or stopped being updated, several titles ceased, and the publisher effectively exited active journal publishing. Advanced Science Letters was among the casualties — though its Scopus discontinuation in 2018 preceded the publisher's general wind-down, suggesting that concerns about this specific title's editorial practices were already acute.

The proceedings-only model: what it meant in practice

To understand Advanced Science Letters, one must understand the conference-proceedings publishing economy of the 2010s. Thousands of international conferences were held each year, and their organizers needed a citable outlet for accepted papers. Some conferences published with IEEE, Springer, or ACM; others — particularly smaller or regionally organized events — turned to independent publishers who offered proceedings publication as a service. ASP positioned Advanced Science Letters as exactly such an outlet, on a grand scale: any conference, in any of ten disciplinary areas, could have its proceedings published as a special issue or volume of the journal.

The model's mechanics were straightforward. A conference organizer would arrange with ASP to publish the event's accepted papers; the papers were typeset into a themed volume carrying the journal's ISSNs; and the volume was issued as part of the journal's numbered sequence. Because the journal published nothing but such proceedings, its "issues" were really conference volumes wearing journal clothing — which is why a single issue could run to 11,633 pages.

This model had legitimate uses. For conferences without their own proceedings infrastructure, it provided ISSN-level citability and (while the journal was indexed) Scopus visibility for presented work. Many genuine researchers presented genuine work at genuine conferences and published it in good faith through this channel. But the model also had predictable failure modes, and Advanced Science Letters exhibited them at scale:

• Review was delegated to conference organizers. The journal itself did not operate a unified peer-review system; quality control depended entirely on each conference's program committee. Standards therefore varied enormously across volumes.
• Volume incentives favored quantity. More conferences meant more volumes meant more revenue, creating structural pressure toward accepting marginal events.
• The journal/proceedings boundary blurred. Papers were published under a journal title with volume/issue/page citations, which led many authors — and some evaluators — to treat them as journal articles. They were conference papers.
• Fraudulent conferences exploited the brand. ASP itself warned publicly about "unauthorized conferences" in some countries where organizers used ASP's logo and journal titles without authorization to lure authors — a caution published on aspbs.com that testifies to how the brand was abused.

Scopus's 2018 discontinuation of the title for "Publication Concerns" — the standard reason code for titles where the indexer has lost confidence in editorial quality control — was the institutional verdict on these failure modes. Coverage ended with 2017 content, and the journal never recovered.

Indexing history: rise and fall

During its active years, Advanced Science Letters was covered by Scopus, with coverage recorded as 2010–2017. Scopus coverage was the journal's principal claim to indexing prestige, and it was the reason many authors chose the venue: in many countries' academic evaluation systems, a Scopus-indexed publication carries formal weight for hiring, promotion, and funding.

On the March 2018 update of Scopus's discontinued-titles list, Advanced Science Letters (ISSN 1936-6612 / 1936-7317, American Scientific Publishers) was removed with the reason "Publication Concerns" and final coverage of 2017, Volume 23, Issue 11, pages 11629–11633. This is a matter of public record, documented in Scopus's own discontinuation lists as republished by university libraries. The journal has not been reinstated.

Secondary directories variously report additional indexing: one aggregator lists the journal in UGC CARE (India's University Grants Commission consortium list), which — if current — would matter primarily for Indian authors subject to UGC publication requirements. This claim is reported with attribution and should be verified against the current UGC CARE list, since such listings change and aggregator data goes stale. No verified Web of Science Core Collection coverage (and therefore no Clarivate Journal Impact Factor) was found for the title; any "impact factor" figures displayed for it on aggregator sites are not Clarivate metrics and should not be presented as such.

The practical consequence of the Scopus discontinuation is significant and should be stated plainly: papers published in Advanced Science Letters no longer count as Scopus-indexed publications in evaluation systems that check current indexing status, and there are reports that previously indexed content from discontinued titles can eventually be de-indexed entirely. Authors with ASL papers on their records should check how their institution treats publications in discontinued journals — policies vary, and some institutions grandfather papers published before the discontinuation date while others do not.

Scope and content of the backfile

The backfile of Advanced Science Letters — eight years of proceedings volumes — is large and topically sprawling, reflecting the ten disciplinary areas and the many conferences served. Content consists overwhelmingly of short conference papers: methods, systems, simulations, experiments, and surveys presented at the originating events. Because volumes were conference-driven, the backfile's subject distribution follows the conference market of the 2010s — heavy on computing, engineering, materials, and applied sciences, with representation from the life sciences, medicine, geosciences, agriculture, energy/environment, education, and public policy proportional to the conferences that used the venue.

Researchers mining the backfile should treat it as what it is: a vast conference-proceedings archive. Individual papers may contain valuable methods, datasets, or results — proceedings papers often do — but the papers should be evaluated individually, with attention to the originating conference, rather than on the strength of the journal title. Citation counts in Google Scholar (which indexes the backfile's papers) can help identify the work that the community found useful.

Access and preservation

With the publisher's platform defunct, access to the Advanced Science Letters backfile is fragmented. Individual papers remain discoverable through Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and institutional repositories where authors self-archived. The journal's own site (formerly hosting PDFs of volumes) is no longer maintained. No deposit of the backfile with Portico, CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, or a comparable long-term preservation service was verified, which means the long-term accessibility of the complete run is uncertain — a common fate for the backlists of defunct independent publishers.

Anyone relying on an ASL paper should keep a local copy. Libraries holding print or licensed electronic backfiles should note the preservation gap in their catalog records.

Guidance for authors, evaluators, and librarians

For authors who published in ASL: Do not remove these papers from your record — they represent real presented work — but present them accurately as conference-proceedings papers published in a special issue/volume of Advanced Science Letters, not as journal articles in the conventional sense. Check your institution's policy on publications in Scopus-discontinued journals; if your paper was published before the 2018 discontinuation, some systems still credit it. Ensure your ORCID and Google Scholar profiles reflect the correct venue, and keep accessible copies of your papers since the publisher site is gone.

For evaluators: Distinguish the paper from the venue's history. A weak venue can publish a strong paper and vice versa; read the work. Be aware, however, that the proceedings-only model and the "Publication Concerns" discontinuation are legitimate context for assessing the rigor of the review the paper underwent — which was the originating conference's review, not a journal's. Do not credit ASL papers as current Scopus-indexed publications.

For librarians: Catalog the title as a ceased journal (ISSN 1936-6612 / 1936-7317, 2010–2017), note the proceedings-only character of its content in the catalog record, and flag the preservation gap. Link resolvers should not point to the defunct publisher site as a live source.

For prospective authors: Advanced Science Letters is not accepting submissions and has no legitimate successor soliciting papers under its title. Treat any solicitation invoking this journal's name as suspicious.

What replaced this model: the post-2018 landscape

The demise of Advanced Science Letters coincided with a structural shift in how conference papers are published and evaluated. Understanding that shift helps explain why no equivalent venue has taken its place — and where authors should look instead.

First, the major technical publishers consolidated the proceedings market. IEEE, Springer, and ACM expanded their conference-proceedings programs throughout the 2010s, offering organizers branded, preserved, and reliably indexed outlets (IEEE Xplore, Springer's Lecture Notes series, the ACM Digital Library) with institutional continuity that independent houses could not match. For conferences in computing and engineering — the core of ASL's content — these became the default choices, and their proceedings carry the preservation deposits (Portico, CLOCKSS) and indexing relationships that ASL lacked.

Second, evaluation systems got stricter. As "Publication Concerns" discontinuations multiplied across Scopus in the late 2010s and early 2020s, universities and funding agencies in many countries began checking not just whether a venue was indexed but whether it remains indexed, and some began discounting proceedings papers relative to journal articles. This reduced the incentive for conferences to seek out high-volume independent proceedings publishers and increased the premium on established, preserved venues.

Third, preprint servers changed the dissemination calculus. When ASL was founded in 2010, posting a conference paper to arXiv was common in only a few fields; by the late 2010s, preprints had become standard across much of computing, physics, and the life sciences. A conference paper posted as a preprint is immediately citable, discoverable, and free — which undercuts the core value proposition that proceedings publishers once offered.

The net result is that the niche Advanced Science Letters occupied — rapid, high-volume, multidisciplinary proceedings publication by an independent house — has largely disappeared, and good riddance in the view of many research-integrity observers. Its backfile remains as a historical artifact of a particular era of scholarly communication: voluminous, uneven, but containing real work by real researchers that deserves to be findable and citable on its merits.

A final note on the historical record: because Advanced Science Letters published no general research articles by individual authors, its entire backfile is proceedings content, and that fact should travel with every citation. When you cite an ASL paper, name the originating conference or special issue alongside the journal title wherever the reference format allows it — this gives readers the provenance they need to assess the work and prevents the proceedings paper from being mistaken for a conventionally peer-reviewed journal article. Accurate citation is the least we owe to work published in good faith through a flawed venue, and it is the mechanism by which the useful parts of this large backfile remain distinguishable from its weaker parts.

What could not be verified

In keeping with a strict no-fabrication policy, the following are stated as unverified: the complete roster of editors (Editor-in-Chief, regional and associate editors) across the journal's run; the total number of proceedings volumes/issues published; any article-processing or volume charges paid by conference organizers (no fee schedule was verified); the detailed terms of ASP's agreements with conference organizers; the current legal status of American Scientific Publishers; and the current, authoritative status of the UGC CARE listing claim. None of these gaps affects the core facts above. Readers needing them should consult archived copies of aspbs.com, library catalog records, and Scopus's published discontinuation lists.

Sources and verification note

Facts in this profile were compiled from the journal's own instructions-for-authors document (archived; scope statement, ISSNs, proceedings-only policy, special-sections policy), secondary bibliographic directories (publication history 2010–2017, "cancelled" status, ISSNs, publisher), Scopus discontinued-titles lists as republished by university libraries (discontinuation for "Publication Concerns," final coverage 2017 Vol. 23 Issue 11 pp. 11629–11633), ASP's published author policies (withdrawal penalties, indexing disclaimer, unauthorized-conference warning), and aggregator directory entries (UGC CARE claim, reported with attribution). All prose is original; no text was copied from the cited sources.