Applied Sciences

About Applied Sciences

About Applied Sciences

Applied Sciences is a large international, peer-reviewed, fully open access journal published by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland, covering all aspects of the applied natural sciences. That sentence needs the disambiguation this profile exists to provide, because "Applied Sciences" is a generic title shared by several unrelated publications, and the identity of this record is fixed by its identifier: electronic ISSN 2076-3417. The journal attached to that ISSN is MDPI's Applied Sciences, launched in 2011 and published semimonthly online. It is not Springer's Discover Applied Sciences (the former SN Applied Sciences, a different journal with different ISSNs), it is not any nationally published namesake, and it is not a department or faculty bulletin using similar words. MDPI's own description, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record for ISSN 2076-3417 and this Journals World record — Switzerland, MDPI, coverage from 2011 and the same single ISSN — all point to the same journal, and every fact in this profile concerns that journal only. One correction to this record's older short description should be stated at the outset: that description rendered the publisher as a bare number, "266". That number is a database artefact. The publisher of record is MDPI — the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, MDPI AG in the DOAJ record — based in Basel, Switzerland.

Scale is the first thing to understand about this journal. MDPI describes a broad-scope open access title published semimonthly, organised into dozens of sections, receiving very large submission volumes and operating on short, published timelines; its editor-in-chief has described it in an MDPI interview as one of the largest open access journals, comparable in scope, impact and annual paper volume to the other leading multidisciplinary open access titles. For authors, that combination — very wide scope, full open access, a mid-range impact factor and speed — is the journal's proposition. For readers and research managers, the same combination makes careful identity and quality checking more important, not less: a journal this large is cited everywhere, imitated in name by unrelated titles, and assessed by institutions under policies that differ widely. This profile therefore separates the verifiable record — ISSN, publisher, indexing, charges, licence, editorial structure — from the judgements that each reader must make for their own purpose.

Applied Sciences at a Glance

History and Development

Applied Sciences published its first volume in 2011. Its founding editorial, "Applied Sciences — Connecting Theories with Practice", was written by its first editor-in-chief, Takayoshi Kobayashi of the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, and it set out the founding proposition in terms that still describe the journal: applied sciences put basic science to work; the new open access journal would concentrate on engineering, applied physics, applied chemistry and biological sciences; it would encourage scientists to publish experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible, with no restriction on the length of papers; and it aimed to connect theories with practice. The journal was accepted for coverage in the Science Citation Index Expanded early in its life, with coverage from its first volume, an important step for a new open access title at a time when such titles still had to prove themselves to the citation establishment.

The journal's later development has been a story of scale and structure. Its scope widened from the founding core into environmental and earth sciences and a much larger engineering span; its section architecture grew with it, so that the journal today operates as a federation of subject sections under one title and one ISSN. In April 2025 MDPI announced that Applied Sciences had been selected for coverage in Ei Compendex, the engineering literature database — a milestone the publisher marked publicly, and a relevant one for engineering authors whose institutions weight Compendex coverage. The current editor-in-chief, Giulio Cerullo, set out his view of the role in an MDPI interview: the journal is one of the largest open access journals, spanning physical and chemical sciences, biology, engineering and environmental sciences; his stated aims are to raise its visibility and impact by attracting strong researchers, influential invited reviews and well-led special issues, while maintaining and increasing the rigour of peer review — a pairing of ambitions, scale and rigour, that defines the editorial challenge of every mega-journal and that authors should weigh when they read the journal's promises.

Scope and Section Architecture

MDPI's aims and scope text describes an advanced forum on all aspects of applied natural sciences, publishing reviews, research papers and communications, and encouraging the fullest possible reporting of experimental and theoretical detail: complete methods, and supplementary electronic material where files or software carry detail that print conventions cannot. The journal's own summary of its coverage names applied physics, applied chemistry, engineering, environmental and earth sciences, and applied biology. DOAJ's subject classification for the journal spans Technology and Engineering generally, together with Biology, Physics and Chemistry — an unusually wide classification that accurately reflects a journal designed to have no disciplinary wall inside the applied sciences.

The operative scope, however, is the section list, because manuscripts are handled inside sections with their own editors. The journal organises its sections under five broad subjects. In Biology and Life Sciences: Applied Biosciences and Bioengineering, Applied Dentistry and Oral Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Applied Microbiology, and Applied Neuroscience and Neural Engineering. In Chemistry and Materials Science: Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical and Molecular Sciences, Nanotechnology and Applied Nanosciences, and Surface Sciences and Technology. In Environmental and Earth Sciences: Environmental Sciences, Green Sustainable Science and Technology, Earth Sciences and Geography, and Ecology Science and Engineering. In Physical Sciences: Energy Science and Technology, Optics and Lasers, Acoustics and Vibrations, Applied Physics, Quantum Science and Technology, Applied Thermal Engineering, and Fluid Science and Technology. In Engineering: Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Applied Industrial Technologies, Food Science and Technology, Robotics and Automation, Aerospace Science and Engineering, Marine Science and Engineering, Transportation and Future Mobility, and Agricultural Science and Technology. A manuscript that cannot name the section it belongs to has not yet found its scope; a manuscript that can name its section, and is written for that section's community, is using the journal as it is designed to be used.

Two features of the model deserve emphasis. First, the journal's special-issue culture: a large share of its content is organised through special issues led by guest editors on defined themes, which is how a journal of this breadth creates readable, community-sized collections inside a very large whole. Second, its stated standard is applied contribution: work should put science to use — a method, material, device, model or process with a demonstrated or clearly argued application — rather than present basic science with an application asserted in the final paragraph. Purely theoretical work usually belongs in a more specialised title, a boundary the journal's own section guidance draws explicitly in places.

Editorial Process, Speed and Open Access Economics

DOAJ records the journal's review model as single anonymous peer review — reviewers know the authors' identities; authors do not know the reviewers' — and records that plagiarism detection is in place, that authors retain copyright, and that articles appear under a CC BY licence, the most permissive standard open licence, allowing reuse with attribution. Preservation is recorded through CLOCKSS, with the Swiss National Library named, and DOAJ gives a publication-time figure of six weeks as its directory snapshot of the journal's overall submission-to-publication span.

MDPI's own current figures are faster and more specific: the publisher states that a first decision is provided approximately fifteen days after submission, and that acceptance to publication takes a median of 2.9 days, giving those as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026. Directory and publisher figures measure different things — an overall span against stage medians — and both are quoted here with their sources so that readers are not misled by either. What both establish is that this is a rapid-publication journal by design. Speed of that order is a genuine service to authors with priority-sensitive results, and it also places a corresponding duty on authors: a manuscript should arrive submission-ready, with figures, data statements and supplementary files complete, because the process will not slow down to let a careless manuscript catch up.

The economics are those of author-side open access. MDPI's charge page for the journal states an article processing charge of CHF 2,400 for papers accepted after peer review, payable in Swiss francs or in euros, US dollars, pounds sterling, Japanese yen or Canadian dollars, with invoices issued by MDPI itself — the publisher warns that only its own official invoices are valid and that it authorises no third party to collect charges. DOAJ's record confirms the same figure. Discounts exist through MDPI's institutional open access programme for participating institutions and for members of the journal's affiliated societies, the International Society for Plasma Medicine and the Polish Society of Applied Electromagnetics. There are no reader charges: everything the journal publishes is free to read, download and reuse under CC BY. Authors should verify the current charge and their discount eligibility on the journal's charge page at submission, since charges across this publisher's portfolio are revised from time to time.

Metrics and Indexing, in Proportion

MDPI publishes an Impact Factor of 2.9 for 2025 and a five-year Impact Factor of 3.0 for the same year, and ranks the journal Q2 in the Journal Citation Reports category Engineering, Multidisciplinary, with a CiteScore quartile of Q1 in the narrower category Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes. This record carries an h-index of 197. Those figures describe a large, mid-to-upper-tier multidisciplinary journal: not a selective flagship, and not a marginal outlet, but a high-volume venue whose average paper is cited at a respectable rate for applied fields and whose best papers are cited very heavily indeed. As with every mega-journal, the averages conceal a wide spread — section, topic and article type move an individual paper's prospects far more than the journal-level figure does — and the honest use of the impact factor here is as a threshold check (the journal is solidly inside the recognised citation system) rather than as a prediction.

The indexing record is the stronger part of the journal's credentials. MDPI lists indexing in Scopus and in the Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science, together with Ei Compendex — coverage announced in April 2025 — Inspec, Embase and CAPlus / SciFinder. That is a comprehensive set for an applied-science title: the general citation indexes, the engineering index, the physics and computing index, and the chemistry and biomedical services each carry it. The journal is also listed in DOAJ, as this profile's charge, licence and review details drawn from that record demonstrate — a listing that matters because DOAJ admission is an independent check on a fully open access journal's stated practices. A researcher whose institution requires Scopus, Web of Science or Compendex coverage for a publication to count will find those requirements met on the publisher's listing, and should confirm the current position in the relevant index at the moment of reliance, as coverage lists are living documents.

Publishing Here: Practical Guidance

Choose the section first and write to it. With dozens of sections across five subject areas, "the journal" is too big to be an audience; the section's editors, reviewers and readers are the audience, and a manuscript framed for them — their methods, their literature, their open questions — is the manuscript this system handles best. Second, satisfy the journal's founding rule: report experimental and theoretical results in full reproducible detail, and deposit the detail that will not fit the article as supplementary material rather than omitting it. Third, make the application explicit and early: the question the work answers, the setting in which the answer will be used, and the evidence that it works there. Fourth, prepare for pace: respond to reviewer requests completely and promptly, because a rapid editorial pipeline rewards ready authors and exposes unready ones.

Fifth, manage the money before you submit. The charge is CHF 2,400 on acceptance; confirm that a grant, an institutional agreement or an affiliation discount covers it, and expect the invoice only from MDPI itself — the publisher's warning against third-party collection is worth taking literally, since large open access journals are routinely impersonated by fraudulent sites that copy their titles and logos. Verify every approach against the identifiers in this profile: the genuine journal is MDPI's, its ISSN is 2076-3417, and its home is the MDPI journal site. Sixth, consider fit honestly against the alternatives an author in this space typically weighs — other broad open access titles and the specialised journal of the author's own subfield. Applied Sciences offers breadth, speed, full open access and comprehensive indexing; a specialised title may offer a more concentrated readership. Neither answer is universally right, but the choice should be made on the manuscript's needs rather than on a single metric.

Who Should Read Applied Sciences

Readers use a journal of this shape differently from a specialised title. Few people read it cover to cover; instead, its sections and special issues function as standing alerts for their communities, and its articles are found individually through Scopus, Web of Science, Compendex and general scholarly search, which is why its comprehensive indexing matters more to its real readership than its issue structure does. An engineer tracking applied thermal methods, a materials researcher following a surface-science theme, or a clinician-engineer working in biomedical devices can each treat their section as a specialised journal that happens to share a title and platform with many others. For libraries and research managers, the journal's verifiable markers — one ISSN, a single publisher of record in Basel, DOAJ listing, CLOCKSS preservation and named society affiliations — make it straightforward to catalogue and to distinguish from the unrelated titles that share its generic name, provided the ISSN check is actually performed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which "Applied Sciences" is this? The MDPI journal from Basel, Switzerland, identified by ISSN 2076-3417 and published since 2011. It is a different journal from Springer's Discover Applied Sciences and from any other namesake; the ISSN, not the title, is the identity check.

Is the journal fully open access? Yes. MDPI describes it as a fully open access journal, DOAJ lists it, articles are published under a CC BY licence with authors retaining copyright, and readers pay nothing.

What does it charge authors? An article processing charge of CHF 2,400 for accepted papers, stated on MDPI's charge page and confirmed in the DOAJ record, with discounts for participating institutions and affiliated society members.

What is its impact factor? MDPI publishes 2.9 for 2025, with a five-year figure of 3.0, a JCR Q2 rank in Engineering, Multidisciplinary, and a CiteScore Q1 in Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes.

How fast is publication? MDPI reports a first decision at approximately fifteen days after submission and a median 2.9 days from acceptance to publication for papers published in the first half of 2026; DOAJ's directory snapshot gives six weeks as an overall publication time.

Where is it indexed? MDPI lists Scopus, SCIE, Ei Compendex, Inspec, Embase and CAPlus / SciFinder among its services, and the journal is DOAJ-listed.

Who leads the journal? Its founding editor-in-chief was Takayoshi Kobayashi, whose 2011 editorial launched the title; its current editor-in-chief is Giulio Cerullo, who has set out his aims for the journal in an MDPI interview.

Verification Note

This profile was compiled from the journal's saved record in this directory (title, slug, ISSN 2076-3417, Swiss origin, coverage from 2011 and the stored h-index of 197), MDPI's journal pages (description, frequency, affiliations, indexing, ranks, impact factors, timelines and the CHF 2,400 charge), MDPI's announcements of the journal's Science Citation Index Expanded and Ei Compendex coverage and its interview with the current editor-in-chief, the journal's 2011 founding editorial, and its DOAJ record obtained through the DOAJ search API (publisher, licence, copyright, review model, preservation and charge). An interim empty aggregator read was not treated as evidence about indexing; every indexing and access claim above rests on the publisher's listing or the completed DOAJ record.