About Advances in Heat Transfer

Advances in Heat Transfer

Advances in Heat Transfer is one of the longest-running review serials in thermal science: a book series published by Elsevier under its Academic Press imprint, issued in numbered volumes since the 1960s and reaching Volume 60 in 2025. It does not publish ordinary submitted journal articles. Each volume collects a small number of long, invited review chapters — often fifty to one hundred pages each — that consolidate a subfield of heat transfer for researchers, design engineers, and graduate students. ScienceDirect explicitly classifies it as a book series, and Scopus and SCImago rank it alongside journals, which is why it carries an ISSN, an h-index, and a quartile despite working nothing like a monthly journal. This profile sets out what the series is, what it covers, who has edited it, how its numbers should be read, and what a realistic route to contributing looks like.

Quick facts

A book series that is ranked like a journal — why that happens

Heat transfer grew as a distinct engineering science in the post-war decades, alongside nuclear reactors, aerospace systems, power generation, and chemical processing. The primary literature fragmented across mechanical, chemical, and nuclear engineering journals, physics journals, and conference proceedings. A review serial that periodically asked leading groups to stop, survey a topic completely, and write the long synthesis that no journal would give them space for filled a real gap. Advances in Heat Transfer was built for exactly that purpose, and its early volumes reflect the founding concerns: Volume 6 (1970) carried long treatments of supersonic flows with separated regions, optical methods, unsteady convective heat transfer in channels, and turbulent pipe flow with variable properties; Volume 9 (1973) covered thermosyphon technology, gas–solid mixture flows, condensation, natural-convection stability, and cryogenic insulation. Those chapter lengths — routinely eighty to one hundred pages — remain the series signature.

Because Elsevier sells the series by subscription to libraries, assigns each chapter a DOI in the modern era, and supplies the content to Scopus for indexing, bibliometric systems treat its chapters much as they treat journal articles. SCImago therefore lists the title, computes an SJR from Scopus citations, and assigns quartiles within categories such as fluid flow and transfer processes, mechanical engineering, and condensed-matter physics. None of that converts the series into a journal. There is no continuous submission flow, no issue-based peer-review queue for outside manuscripts, and no article-processing-charge open-access route. Understanding that hybrid status — book-series publishing model, journal-like indexing — is the key to using every other fact in this profile correctly.

Scope in depth

The scope is heat transfer in its full breadth, together with the mass-transfer and fluid-mechanics questions that cannot be separated from it. The families below recur across the archive and describe the series more honestly than a one-line aims statement.

Conduction, convection, and radiation fundamentals. Foundational chapters develop theory and measurement for single-phase convection, natural convection, forced flow in channels and over surfaces, thermal radiation exchange, and conduction in complex geometries. Optical and other non-intrusive measurement methods have been a recurring theme since the early volumes, reflecting how much of heat-transfer progress depends on being able to measure temperature and flux without disturbing the phenomenon.

Phase change: boiling, condensation, heat pipes, and thermosyphons. Few serials have returned to phase-change topics as persistently. Condensation heat transfer received a major chapter as early as Volume 9; heat-pipe science received an eighty-page treatment in Volume 41 (2009) covering microgrooved heat pipes; thermosyphon technology was surveyed in the 1970s and the topic family has continued as devices shrank toward electronics-cooling scales. Anyone tracing how phase-change cooling moved from power-plant condensers to laptop and data-centre hardware will find this series a useful spine for that history.

Nanofluids, micro- and nanoscale transfer. Volume 41 also carried a major review of heat transfer in nanofluids, a topic that generated intense claims and counter-claims in the 2000s — exactly the kind of literature that benefits from a long, critical synthesis rather than another short experimental paper. Later volumes extended the scale-down story toward nanoscale thermal transport and microchannel systems, in step with electronics thermal management.

Energy systems and nuclear safety. Volume 29 was devoted to heat transfer in nuclear reactor safety, and energy themes — heat exchangers, including three-fluid exchanger design theory in Volume 26, direct-contact transfer with moving droplets, and single-phase liquid jet impingement — run through the archive. Jet impingement and heat-sink design connect directly to the most recent volumes: publisher descriptions for Volume 60 highlight a thermal-performance study of a novel heat-sink design and innovative thermal-management solutions for high-performance electronics, using advanced simulation alongside practical applications.

Bioengineering and interdisciplinary transfer. Volume 22 was devoted to bioengineering heat transfer, and biological, biomedical, and environmental applications have remained within scope where the transfer physics is central. The Journals World record subject spread — chemical engineering, engineering more broadly, and physics and astronomy — reflects this reach: the same conduction or convection analysis may serve a reactor designer, a chemical-plant engineer, and a physicist modelling a planetary atmosphere.

Computational heat transfer. Numerical methods are treated as part of the field rather than as a separate silo, from early analytical treatments through modern simulation-driven design studies. Readers should check the series ISSN, 0065-2717, when ordering or citing, to avoid confusing this series with neighbouring titles on numerical heat transfer that differ by a single word.

Editors and the commissioning model

The series was shaped for decades by its founding serial editors, James P. Hartnett and Thomas F. Irvine Jr., whose names appear across the early and middle volumes on ScienceDirect, alongside co-editors including Avram Bar-Cohen, Young I. Cho, and George A. Greene for particular volumes. That long editorial continuity is characteristic of the great review serials: the editors judgement about which topics were ripe for synthesis effectively curated the field memory.

For the most recent volumes, publisher listings for Volume 60 (hardback, November 2025, ISBN 9780443345135) name John Patrick Abraham (University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul), John M. Gorman (University of Minnesota), and Wolodymyr J. Minkowycz (University of Illinois Chicago) as series editors. Minkowycz biography in those listings notes his wider editorial roles in the heat-transfer journal literature, which illustrates the series place inside the field establishment rather than at its fringe.

Chapters are commissioned. Editors identify a topic whose literature has grown large or confused enough to need consolidation, invite a group known for that work, agree scope and length, and review the resulting chapter. An outside researcher cannot submit a chapter through a manuscript portal and expect a decision; the realistic paths to authorship are to become a recognised group in a subfield, to publish the primary studies a future synthesis will need, and, where a topic is plainly overdue for review, to put a concise proposal — topic, gap since the last synthesis, outline, author record, and delivery timetable — directly to the series editors or to Elsevier serials team. Even a strong proposal competes with the editors own commissioning plan for a volume that may contain only three to six chapters.

Metrics: reading h-index 37, SJR 0.397 and Q2

The Journals World record gives an h-index of 37, an SJR of 0.397, and a Q2 best quartile. In plain terms: thirty-seven chapters have each accumulated at least thirty-seven Scopus citations in the data SCImago uses, a respectable long-tail record for a serial publishing only a handful of chapters a year; the SJR, which weights citations by the influence of the citing source, sits in the middle range of its categories; and Q2 places it between the top quarter and the median of ranked titles in its best category.

Three interpretive cautions matter more than the numbers themselves. First, chapter volume is tiny compared with a journal article volume, so every indicator is volatile: one heavily cited synthesis — a nanofluids or heat-pipe review, for example — can move the h-index and citation averages noticeably, while a year of specialised chapters can lower averages without indicating any fall in quality. Second, aggregator sites working from different Scopus snapshots quote different values for this title, including h-index figures a point or two apart and impact-style scores computed by the aggregators themselves from Scopus data. Those are not official Clarivate Journal Impact Factors, and this profile does not present them as such; anyone needing a Journal Citation Reports figure must check that database directly, and where a figure could not be verified there, it is not asserted here. Third, cite the metric year when you cite the metric. SJR and quartiles are annual products, and a Q2 label without a year is an incomplete claim for any title, this one included.

For tenure, promotion, or library decisions, the better evidence is chapter-level: who wrote the synthesis, how often that specific chapter is cited, whether current textbooks and handbooks rely on it, and whether the library engineers actually use the volumes. The series six-decade survival under successive editors is itself a form of peer verdict that a single quartile cannot capture.

Access, formats, and cost

On ScienceDirect the series is sold by chapter and by volume under subscription or purchase, with abstracts visible and full text controlled by entitlement; front matter such as contributor lists and prefaces is often free while chapters require access. In parallel, each volume is a physical book: Volume 60 is listed as a roughly 300-page hardback from Academic Press, with a separate electronic ISBN for the ebook edition. Institutional libraries remain the main buyers, commonly through ScienceDirect book-series packages or standing orders. Retail hardback prices are set per volume by booksellers and change over time, so no single price is quoted here; readers needing a figure should check the current Elsevier or bookseller listing for the specific volume and format. No article-processing charge is published for this series, consistent with its commissioned model: authors do not pay to place a chapter, and readers or their libraries pay for access, with any open-access availability determined at chapter level and marked on ScienceDirect where it applies.

How to use the backfile well

Start from the problem, not the volume. Search ScienceDirect or Scopus by phenomenon and device — condensation, jet impingement, heat pipe, nanofluid, thermosyphon, heat sink — filtered to this series, then read the newest relevant chapter first and follow its references backward for foundations and its citations forward for corrections and extensions. Check dates carefully: a 1970s chapter on natural-convection stability may still teach the theory beautifully, while its property data, correlations ranges, and computational advice belong to their era. Treat every correlation a chapter reports as bounded by the geometry, fluid, and parameter range in which it was validated; the best chapters in this series are explicit about those bounds, and that explicitness is one reason engineers keep them on the shelf beside the standard handbooks used in design offices. A graduate student can use a chapter as a structured entry point into a subfield, an instructor can assign one as the long reading that a lecture course cannot itself supply, and a design engineer can use the synthesis to shortlist the primary studies that must be read in full before a correlation is trusted in a safety-relevant calculation. In each case the chapter is a guide to the literature, not a replacement for checking the original experiments.

Verification note: publisher, imprint, and country

The Journals World record lists the publisher as Elsevier Ltd (United Kingdom), ISSN 0065-2717, h-index 37, SJR 0.397, and Q2. ScienceDirect volume pages show Elsevier Inc. copyright and the same ISSN, while current book listings present the imprint as Academic Press, an Elsevier imprint, with United States-based publisher entities named for the print volumes. As with many Elsevier serials, parent company, imprint, and country labels vary by catalogue and by year; the ISSN — the identity key that matters for ordering, citing, and deduplication — agrees exactly across the record and the official ScienceDirect pages, and no ISSN conflict was found. This profile therefore reports the variation transparently instead of declaring either label an error. No duplicate Journals World record for this series was identified from the record checked for this profile.

Frequently asked questions

Is Advances in Heat Transfer a journal? No. ScienceDirect classifies it as a book series. It is indexed and ranked like a journal in Scopus and SCImago, but it publishes commissioned review volumes.

What is its ISSN? 0065-2717, confirmed on ScienceDirect volume pages and in the Journals World record. Each volume additionally has its own ISBN.

How long has it run? From Volume 1 in the 1960s to Volume 60 in 2025 — more than six decades, under founding editors Hartnett and Irvine and, most recently, series editors Abraham, Gorman, and Minkowycz.

Can I submit a paper? There is no open submission route. Chapters are invited; see the commissioning section for the realistic proposal path.

Is it open access? What does it cost to publish? It is primarily a subscription and book-sales series. No author processing charge is published; access terms for any individual chapter are shown on its ScienceDirect page.

Should I trust the impact scores on aggregator websites? Treat them as those sites own Scopus-derived calculations, not as official Journal Impact Factors. Verify any formal metric in its source database and cite it with its year.

Bottom line

Advances in Heat Transfer is the thermal-science field long memory in bound form: sixty volumes of deliberately long, editor-commissioned syntheses, from condensation and thermosyphons in the 1970s to nanofluids, heat pipes, and electronics thermal management in the present century. Its Q2 standing and h-index of 37 describe a steadily used specialist resource, not a high-throughput journal — and judged on its own terms, as a place where a subfield periodically gets the full-length review it needs, few engineering serials have matched its staying power.

Reading the series alongside the wider literature

Heat transfer does not live in one serial. A researcher who relies only on this series will miss the rapid experimental literature in the major thermal journals, the archival conference literature from the profession heat-transfer conferences, and the handbook tradition that design practice actually codes into standards. The value of this series in that wider ecology is consolidation and judgement. Journal papers report what one group did with one apparatus in one range; handbook entries compress results into usable correlations with little room for argument; a chapter in this series has the space to compare groups, explain why their results differ, identify which discrepancies come from measurement method, surface condition, fluid purity, or scaling, and state plainly where the field still lacks reliable data. That adjudicating function is hardest to replace and explains why libraries continue to value long review serials even in an era of instant search.

For a literature review, a sound workflow is to begin with the most recent relevant chapter here for orientation and vocabulary, extract its key primary references and its stated open problems, then run forward-citation searches on both the chapter and those primary papers in Scopus, and finally read the newest primary studies in full. For teaching, pairing one classic chapter — for example an early condensation or natural-convection synthesis — with a recent chapter on the same phenomenon shows students how measurement capability, computing power, and application pressure reshape a field without changing its governing equations. For industrial practice, the chapters are best used at the scoping stage of a design, to choose candidate approaches and correlations, before detailed calculation proceeds from the primary sources and applicable codes. Used in those three disciplined ways, the series saves weeks; used as a sole authority for a final design number, it would be asked to do work its editors never claimed for it.