About Composites and Advanced Materials

Composites and Advanced Materials — Full Journal Profile

Composites and Advanced Materials is an open access, peer-reviewed journal in composite materials science and engineering, published by SAGE Publishing in the United Kingdom. It is identified by a single electronic ISSN, 2634-9833, and its articles carry DOIs in the form 10.1177/26349833 followed by an article number, with the online ISSN embedded in the DOI string. The journal is the current title of a publishing line that ran for roughly three decades as Advanced Composites Letters: the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) records the older title as replaced by this one, and SAGE has published articles under the Composites and Advanced Materials name since 2021. That lineage is the single most important fact about this record, because it explains the journal's volume numbering, its citation history and several numbers that circulate about it in secondary directories.

Quick facts

Identity: a renamed journal, not a new one

Serial titles change names more often than authors expect, and each change creates a bibliographic trap. When a journal is renamed, the new title receives a new ISSN, citation databases open a new source record, and the back file stays behind under the old name. Anyone who searches only for the new title sees a young journal with a short history; anyone who searches only for the old title sees a journal that appears to have stopped. Composites and Advanced Materials is exactly such a case, and this profile treats the two titles as what they are: successive names of one continuing line of publication, each to be cited under its own name and ISSN for the years in which it appeared.

The older title, Advanced Composites Letters, was a United Kingdom journal of short, focused communications on composite materials and composite structures. For most of its life it was published by Adcotec Ltd; in its final period it was published open access by SAGE, from 2019. Its identifiers were print ISSN 0963-6935 and online ISSN 2633-366X. The DOAJ record for Composites and Advanced Materials carries a "replaces" field naming exactly those two ISSNs, and the DOAJ record for the older title states that it is replaced by ISSN 2634-9833. Articles from 2021 onwards appear under the new title. The volume numbering tells the same story of continuity: articles published in Composites and Advanced Materials in 2024 are numbered as Volume 33, a count that only makes sense as a continuation of the predecessor's long run rather than as the fourth volume of a journal founded in 2021.

Two neighbouring titles must be kept apart from this one. Advanced Composite Materials is a Taylor & Francis journal associated with the Japanese and Korean composite materials societies, with ISSNs 0924-3046 and 1568-5519; despite sharing three title words, it is a different journal with a different publisher. 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. The reliable test is always the ISSN: if the identifier is 2634-9833, the article belongs to the SAGE title profiled here.

Scope and topic areas

SAGE organises the journal around five Topic Areas, each led by an expert Topic Editor, covering the broadly defined field of the science and engineering of composites and advanced materials and structures. The five areas, as set out on the journal's own topic pages, are:

• Biomaterials — materials designed to interact with biological systems, a natural extension of the journal's composites brief into medical and bioengineering applications.
• Coatings, Films and Interfaces — led, on the journal's topic page, by Professor Shinji Ogihara of Tokyo University of Science, Japan. This area takes in experimental, numerical and theoretical work on surface layers, thin films and the interfaces between phases, fibres and matrices where composite performance is so often decided.
• Composites — led by Professor Stephen Hallett of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. This is the journal's historic core: fibre-reinforced polymers, laminates, sandwich structures and other multi-phase materials, studied experimentally, numerically and theoretically.
• Materials Science — led by Professor Paul Hogg of the University of London, United Kingdom, Emeritus Professor of Materials Engineering. This area welcomes work on the modelling and simulation, synthesis and processing, testing and characterisation, and end-of-life disposal of materials ranging from bulk polymers, metals and ceramics to foams, gels, fibres, textiles, metamaterials and nanomaterials, for structural, functional and aesthetic applications.
• Sustainable and Green Materials — the area devoted to materials and processes with a reduced environmental burden, including natural-fibre composites, recycled feedstocks and biodegradable systems.

The keywords recorded in the journal's DOAJ listing — biomaterials, composites, sustainable materials and materials science — compress the same scope into four terms. In practice, the published content runs from the mechanics of carbon-fibre laminates under fatigue loading, through natural-fibre and hybrid reinforcements, to coatings, damage modelling, additive manufacturing of composite parts and the recycling of thermoset waste. A manuscript fits this journal when its contribution is to the material or the structure itself: a new reinforcement architecture, a processing route, a characterisation method, a predictive model of behaviour in service, or a credible route to a lighter, stronger, longer-lived or greener material.

What the journal publishes

The journal publishes original research articles as its main article type, together with review articles and short communications; published issues show research papers carrying full experimental or modelling apparatus alongside shorter communications that report a single well-defined result, such as a laminate design observation with direct consequences for buckling analysis. Articles are published online under the annual volume, and each carries a DOI in the 10.1177/26349833 pattern, a Creative Commons licence statement and the journal's ISSN in its citation line. Because the journal is online only, there is no print edition and no print ISSN; cataloguers who record one for this title have imported it from the predecessor or from a neighbouring journal.

Editorial arrangements and peer review

Editorially, the journal works through its Topic Area structure: manuscripts are handled within the topic area they belong to, by editors who are active researchers in that area, which is why the topic pages name the responsible editors publicly. DOAJ records the review model as single anonymous peer review — reviewers know the authors' identities while authors do not know the reviewers' — and records that the journal operates plagiarism screening. The name of an overall editor-in-chief for the journal could not be verified from an official source during the preparation of this profile, so none is stated here; the journal's editorial board page on the SAGE platform is the authoritative listing and should be checked at the time of submission. SAGE has also advertised open associate editor positions for this journal on its publisher pages, which indicates an actively staffed editorial structure rather than a dormant title.

Open access model, charges and timing

Composites and Advanced Materials is a gold open access journal: every article is free to read on publication. DOAJ records open access under this title from 2021, matching the renaming. The DOAJ record lists three Creative Commons licence options — CC BY, CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND — and authors should confirm at acceptance which licence applies to their article, because the licence governs how the work may be reused, translated and built upon. The charge recorded by DOAJ is an article processing charge of up to 2,000 USD, with a waiver policy in place; OpenAlex's source record independently lists an APC of 2,000 USD for 2024, after 1,600 USD in 2021 and 1,500 USD in 2022 and 2023, which gives authors a realistic picture of how the charge has moved. No other charges are recorded by DOAJ. The typical time from submission to publication recorded by DOAJ is about 21 weeks. None of these figures is a promise: charges and waivers are set by the publisher and can change, so the figures on the journal's author instructions page at the moment of submission are the ones that govern.

Metrics, read honestly

The cleanest citation picture for this title under its own ISSN comes from OpenAlex, whose source record is resolved directly from the ISSN endpoint for 2634-9833 (source S4210235023, SAGE Publishing as host organisation). At the time of checking, that record counted 158 works, all of them open access, which had received 1,048 citations in total; it assigned the journal an h-index of 13 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.06. The works by year underline that this is a steady, mid-sized journal rather than a high-volume outlet: 38 works in 2021, 17 in 2022, 26 in 2023, 33 in 2024, 27 in 2025 and 17 recorded for 2026 at the time of checking. OpenAlex's topic profile for the source is dominated, as the scope would predict, by the mechanical behaviour of composites, natural-fibre reinforced composites and fibre-reinforced polymer composites.

Readers will meet other numbers. This directory's stored template for the record carried an h-index of 32 and a coverage window of 2025–2026. The coverage window is simply wrong for this title: the journal has published under this name since 2021, and the stored figure appears to be an artefact of a database refresh rather than a publication fact. The larger h-index most likely reflects the longer lineage — Scopus-derived summaries commonly carry the combined history of a renamed journal, and the predecessor's own Scopus-era record ran from the mid-1990s to 2020 — but it could not be verified from an official source for ISSN 2634-9833 alone during this research, so this profile reports the OpenAlex figure for the current title and flags the stored figure rather than repeating it as fact. SAGE describes the journal on its own topic pages as a JCR ranked journal; the specific Journal Impact Factor value is published by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports and could not be verified from an official source for this profile, so no impact factor number is stated here. Any site quoting one for this journal should be asked which database, which year and which title the number belongs to.

Indexing and discoverability

The journal's listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals was verified directly from the DOAJ search API for this profile: DOAJ holds one record for ISSN 2634-9833, under this exact title, with SAGE Publishing as publisher. OpenAlex likewise records the source as included in DOAJ since 2021. DOAJ listing matters in practice: it is the registry that libraries, funders and open access compliance checks consult, and it independently confirms the journal's stated peer review, licensing and charge information. Beyond DOAJ, indexing claims for this title in sources consulted for this profile could not all be verified against official lists, and this profile therefore makes no further indexing claim: authors whose institution requires a specific index should check that index's own master list for ISSN 2634-9833 before submitting, a two-minute check that settles the question definitively.

How to submit

Submissions are made online through the journal's home on the SAGE Journals platform (journal code ACM), following the author instructions SAGE maintains for the title. In practical terms, an author should: identify the Topic Area the manuscript belongs to before drafting the cover letter, since the journal's editorial handling follows those areas; prepare the manuscript to SAGE's formatting and reference requirements as set out in the author instructions; be ready to state funding, conflicts of interest and data availability, as SAGE's standard policies require; and confirm the current article processing charge and licence terms on the journal's own pages, since the figures recorded in directories — including the DOAJ figures quoted above — are snapshots. Work that belongs to the predecessor's era should be cited as Advanced Composites Letters; work from 2021 onwards should be cited as Composites and Advanced Materials, with the article's DOI, which embeds the current ISSN and removes all ambiguity.

Is this journal right for your paper?

The journal suits authors whose work is squarely in composites or advanced materials and who want an open access SAGE venue with a defined topic-editor structure and a readership in materials engineering. Its scope is broad within that field — from biomaterials to coatings to sustainable materials — but it is not a general engineering journal, and manuscripts whose material is incidental to an application study will usually be a better fit elsewhere. The realistic expectations are those of a mid-sized specialist title: a citation record that is respectable rather than spectacular (an OpenAlex h-index of 13 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.06 at checking time), a recorded publication timeline of about 21 weeks, and a charge of up to 2,000 USD with waivers in place. Authors comparing venues should also weigh the Journal of Composite Materials and Composites Part A for subscription-route alternatives in the same field, and Advanced Composite Materials for the Japanese and Korean societies' perspective — keeping the ISSNs apart, as this profile has stressed, because in this corner of materials publishing the titles are far more alike than the journals are.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Composites and Advanced Materials? Its online ISSN is 2634-9833. It has no print ISSN; the journal is published online by SAGE Publishing.

Is it the same journal as Advanced Composites Letters? It is the continuation of that journal under a new title from 2021. DOAJ records Advanced Composites Letters (ISSN 0963-6935 and 2633-366X) as replaced by this title. Cite pre-2021 articles under the old name and later articles under the new one. The JournalsWorld profile of the predecessor is post 587169.

Who publishes it? SAGE Publishing, in the United Kingdom. (This directory's stored record named the publisher only by a numeric code; the DOAJ record and the journal's own platform pages name SAGE.)

Is it open access, and what does it cost? Yes — gold open access since 2021 under this title. DOAJ records an article processing charge of up to 2,000 USD with a waiver policy, and Creative Commons licence options including CC BY. Confirm the current figures on the journal's author pages before submitting.

How is it peer reviewed? Single anonymous peer review, as recorded by DOAJ, with plagiarism screening, handled within the journal's five Topic Areas.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex's record for ISSN 2634-9833 (checked for this profile) counts 158 works with 1,048 citations, an h-index of 13 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.06. Larger h-index figures quoted elsewhere appear to reflect the journal's longer lineage under its former title and could not be verified for this ISSN alone.

Where do I submit? Through the journal's home on the SAGE Journals platform (journal code ACM), following its author instructions.

Sources and verification note

This profile is based on the journal's record in the Directory of Open Access Journals, fetched directly from the DOAJ search API for ISSN 2634-9833 (title, publisher SAGE Publishing, United Kingdom; open access from 2021; the "replaces" chain to ISSNs 0963-6935 and 2633-366X; single anonymous review; plagiarism screening; licence options; the charge of up to 2,000 USD with a waiver policy; the 21-week publication time; subject classification and keywords); on the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 2634-9833 (source S4210235023: works, citations, h-index, mean citedness, works by year, APC history and topic profile), fetched for this profile; on SAGE's own topic-area pages for the journal (the five Topic Areas and their named editors, and the publisher's description of the journal as JCR ranked); on the published articles themselves (2024 articles numbered as Volume 33 with DOIs in the 10.1177/26349833 pattern); and on the JournalsWorld profile of the predecessor title, Advanced Composites Letters (post 587169), whose own identifiers and successor statement agree with the DOAJ chain. The stored template on this record gave the publisher as a numeric code, a coverage window of 2025–2026 and an h-index of 32; the first two are corrected above and the third is discussed, with its likely lineage explanation, in the metrics section rather than repeated as verified fact. Where a detail could not be verified from an official source — the name of an overall editor-in-chief, a specific impact factor value, and further indexing claims — this profile says so instead of filling the gap.