Materials

About Materials

About Materials

Materials is an international, peer-reviewed, fully open access journal on materials science and engineering, published semimonthly online by MDPI in Switzerland. Its sole ISSN is 1996-1944 (electronic). That single identifier does essential work for this profile, because "Materials" is one of the most generic titles in scholarly publishing: book series, conference proceedings and other journals have used similar names, and only the journal carrying ISSN 1996-1944, published by MDPI, is the journal described here. Whenever this profile — or any citation, application or evaluation — says Materials, it means the MDPI journal identified by that ISSN, and readers verifying a claim about the journal should check the ISSN rather than trusting the bare title.

MDPI describes the journal as a forum for papers that advance the in-depth understanding of the relationship between structure, properties and functions of all kinds of materials. It publishes spotlights, reviews, original research contributions and short communications, accepts experimental and theoretical work of any length with no restriction on maximum paper length, and covers all aspects of materials science and engineering, including synthesis, structure, and mechanical, chemical, electronic, magnetic and optical properties, together with their applications. The Spanish Materials Society (SOCIEMAT), the Manufacturing Engineering Society (MES) and the Chinese Society of Micro-Nano Technology (CSMNT) are affiliated with the journal, and their members receive discounts on article processing charges.

Journal at a Glance

The older stored Journals World text for this post rendered the publisher field as a bare number rather than a name. That number is a database artefact; the record's own publisher taxonomy points to the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, and MDPI's own pages confirm MDPI as publisher. The stored text's other headline figures — an impact factor of 3.7 and an h-index of 216 — are examined, with their sources and dates, in the metrics section below; the impact factor figure matches the 2025 figure MDPI itself displays, while the h-index belongs to a Scopus-style count that other databases report differently.

History and Model

Materials was launched in the late 2000s — the stored record gives coverage from 2008 — as part of MDPI's expansion of fully open access, online-only journals from its base in Basel, Switzerland. It grew from a small generalist materials title into one of the largest journals in its field by volume: a direct OpenAlex source reading for ISSN 1996-1944 taken for this profile counted about 58,859 works for this source, a cumulative output comparable to century-old society journals achieved in well under two decades. That growth pattern is inseparable from the journal's operating model: semimonthly online publication, a large editorial board handling manuscripts continuously rather than by issue deadlines, sections that organise an enormous scope into manageable streams, and a heavy use of Special Issues — guest-edited collections on specific topics that MDPI uses to build communities of authors and readers around emerging themes.

The journal today is organised into topical sections, of which Construction and Building Materials and Mechanics of Materials are representative examples named on its site. The Mechanics of Materials section, for instance, defines its mission as disseminating work on mechanics-guided and mechanics-based design and synthesis, mechanical behaviour and microstructure–property relationships across metals, polymers, ceramics, carbon materials, composites, biomaterials and natural materials, including interdisciplinary work at the meeting point of mechanics with materials, physics and chemistry, and emerging areas such as additive manufacturing, machine learning, low-dimensional and architected materials and batteries. That section structure is the practical map authors should use: a manuscript is submitted into a section's stream, handled by editors working in that area, and read first by that section's audience.

Aims and Scope in Detail

All Classes of Materials

The stated scope covers all classes of materials: ceramics and glasses; polymers and plastics; composites; semiconductors; magnetic materials; biological and biomimetic materials; silica, dots and carbon materials; metals and alloys from nanoscale to bulk; functional materials for medical implants in medicine and dentistry; coatings and films; pigments; ionic and covalent crystals; metals and intermetallics. Few journals attempt this breadth deliberately; Materials does, and manages it through its sections and Special Issues rather than through a single editorial standard of what counts as important. The consequence for authors is that scope fit is rarely the barrier — the barrier is quality, completeness and clear contribution within the chosen section.

Structure, Properties, Functions

The intellectual centre of the journal is the structure–property–function relationship: how a material's composition and microstructure produce its mechanical, chemical, electronic, magnetic and optical behaviour, and how that behaviour serves an application. Papers may be experimental, theoretical or both, of any length, and MDPI explicitly requires authors to publish all experimental controls and to make full datasets available where possible. A paper that reports a synthesis with no characterisation, or a property with no structural explanation, misses the journal's stated centre even if its material class is nominally in scope.

Characterisation and Methods

The scope expressly includes advancing material characterisation techniques — electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, calorimetry, nuclear microscopy and spectroscopy, laser technology, optical fibres, Rutherford backscattering and neutron diffraction among the examples the journal itself lists. Methods papers therefore have a legitimate home here when they improve how materials are measured, not only when they report a new material. Nanoscience and nanotechnology run across the whole scope, from nanoscale forms of the classical material classes to nano-enabled applications.

Article Types and Special Issues

The journal publishes spotlights, reviews, original research articles and short communications as its named formats. There is no restriction on the maximum length of papers, and MDPI encourages submission of experimental and theoretical results in full detail — a deliberate contrast with letters-style journals that compress methods. In practice, a very large share of the journal's content appears in Special Issues: guest-edited collections, often dozens of papers strong, on topics such as advanced porous ceramics. MDPI promotes Special Issues as easier to navigate, more discoverable and more frequently cited, and supports them through its own channels. Authors invited into a Special Issue should apply the same checks as for any submission — confirm the guest editors, the deadlines, the APC and waiver position, and that the collection genuinely matches the manuscript — because the invitation route and the regular route lead to the same journal and the same standards of record.

Peer Review and Speed

MDPI publishes journal-level performance statistics on the journal's own page. In the reading taken for this profile, MDPI reported that manuscripts are peer-reviewed with a first decision provided in approximately 14.4 days after submission, and acceptance to publication in approximately 3.6 days, giving those as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026. Readers should interpret them exactly as labelled: medians across a very large, section-organised journal, in which many decisions are editorial or follow efficient review rounds. They describe the system's throughput, not a guaranteed timetable for a paper needing major revision, additional experiments or a second review round. MDPI also operates reviewer-recognition arrangements under which timely, thorough reviewers receive a voucher discounting a future MDPI article charge, and the journal requires full experimental controls and data availability as noted above — both features authors will encounter during the process.

Open Access Model and Charges

Materials is fully open access: every article is free for any reader, and the costs are carried by an article processing charge paid by authors or their institutions. MDPI's APC page for the journal, consulted for this profile, states an APC of CHF 2,600 for papers accepted after peer review, payable in Swiss francs or in euros, US dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen or Canadian dollars, with invoices issued by MDPI after acceptance and local VAT or sales tax added where applicable. Discounts exist through MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program for participating institutions and for members of affiliated societies such as SOCIEMAT, MES and CSMNT. OpenAlex listed a different, dollar-converted APC figure (USD 3,137) for this source; where an aggregator conversion and the publisher's own price differ, the publisher's figure governs, and authors should always confirm the CHF amount and any discount on the MDPI page at submission. A DOAJ listing point needs care: the DOAJ search API returned no record for ISSN 1996-1944 in repeated checks made for this profile, and OpenAlex likewise flags this source as not in DOAJ, so this profile makes no claim of DOAJ listing; authors whose funder specifically requires a DOAJ-listed venue should verify the current position directly with DOAJ before submitting.

Indexing and Visibility

MDPI lists the journal's high-visibility indexing as including Scopus, SCIE (Web of Science), PubMed, PMC, Ei Compendex, CaPlus / SciFinder, Inspec and the Astrophysics Data System, among other databases. The combination is well matched to the scope: Scopus and SCIE for citation tracking and evaluation, PubMed/PMC for the biomaterials readership, Ei Compendex and Inspec for engineering and physics, and CaPlus/SciFinder for chemistry. Inclusion in PubMed Central also means the full text of relevant articles is preserved and searchable in that archive, a practical benefit of the fully open access model for long-term discoverability.

Metrics — Year and Database Attached

MDPI's journal page displayed, in the reading taken for this profile, an Impact Factor of 3.7 (2025) and a 5-year Impact Factor of 3.8 (2025), together with journal ranks of JCR Q2 in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary and CiteScore Q1 in Condensed Matter Physics. The stored Journals World record's impact factor of 3.7 is consistent with that publisher-displayed 2025 figure, and its Q2 category label matches the JCR rank MDPI reports. The stored h-index of 216, by contrast, is one database's count: the direct OpenAlex reading for this source (S18714766) gave an h-index of 250, about 58,859 works, about 1,113,048 citations and a two-year mean citedness of about 4.89. Both patterns are plausible simultaneously — OpenAlex counts a broader corpus than the curated citation indexes — and neither should be quoted without naming its database. The honest summary is of a mid-ranked-by-impact-factor, top-quartile-in-some-CiteScore-categories, extremely high-volume open access journal: its influence operates through sheer breadth and availability as much as through selectivity.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

Materials suits authors who need a legitimate, indexed, fully open access venue for a complete materials study, value speed and predictable handling, work in a niche that maps onto one of the journal's sections or an open Special Issue, or must satisfy a funder's immediate open access requirement with full-text archiving. It is a pragmatic choice for solid incremental advances — a well-characterised new composite formulation, a careful property study, a methods improvement — that specialist selective journals might decline on significance grounds rather than quality grounds. Authors from affiliated societies or IOAP institutions should factor the available APC discounts into the comparison.

Authors should look elsewhere when their institution or funder evaluates venues by impact factor alone and a Q2 multidisciplinary listing undersells a result that a selective specialist journal would take; when they cannot pay an APC and have no waiver, discount or institutional coverage; or when their evaluation system requires a DOAJ-listed title, given the verification position set out above. Early-career authors in particular should check how their own institution counts this journal before submitting, because policies toward very large open access journals vary — that is a fact about evaluation systems, not a judgement on any individual article, whose quality stands on its own methods, controls and data, exactly the elements MDPI requires authors to publish in full.

Special Issues, Sections and How to Evaluate This Journal

Two features of this journal deserve a reader's explicit attention because they shape what appears in it. The first is the Special Issue mechanism. Guest editors propose a topic, invite and attract submissions, and handle them within the journal's systems and standards, producing collections that can run from a handful of papers to well over a hundred. At their best, these collections map a fast-moving niche — a new battery chemistry, a class of porous ceramics, a characterisation method — more completely than scattered regular articles could, and MDPI argues they are more discoverable and more cited for exactly that reason. At their weakest, a collection's coherence depends entirely on its guest editors' judgement, so a reader evaluating a single article should look at the article itself: its controls, its data availability, its characterisation completeness. The journal's own requirement to publish all experimental controls and make datasets available where possible gives the reader concrete material for that judgement, which is more than many journals provide.

The second feature is scale combined with breadth. A semimonthly, section-organised journal publishing tens of thousands of papers across every material class cannot operate as a significance filter in the way a small selective journal does; it operates as a quality-and-completeness filter over a very wide intake. That is why this profile has consistently separated the questions evaluators often merge: the journal is legitimately indexed in Scopus, SCIE, PubMed and the engineering and chemistry services listed above; its publisher-displayed impact factor and ranks are respectable mid-field figures; its speed statistics are genuinely fast medians; and none of those facts, in either direction, decides the worth of any individual paper published in it. Institutions that count the venue at all should count it as what it verifiably is, and readers should do what the journal's data-availability rules invite them to do — read the evidence.

Practical Submission Checklist

• Confirm the target by ISSN: MDPI Materials is 1996-1944 — the title alone is too generic to identify a journal.
• Choose the section, or the Special Issue, that genuinely matches the work, and check its editors and deadlines.
• Budget the APC: CHF 2,600 as consulted, minus any IOAP or affiliated-society discount; confirm the live figure on the MDPI APC page.
• Prepare full experimental controls and datasets for availability, as the journal requires.
• Expect fast median handling (about 14.4 days to first decision as a journal median), but plan for revision rounds on top of it.
• Verify any funder conditions — especially DOAJ or licence requirements — against the journal's current status before submitting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Materials? 1996-1944, electronic only. It is the reliable identifier for this journal, because the title is generic.

Who publishes Materials? MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), Switzerland. The bare number in this site's older stored text is a database artefact, not a publisher.

Is Materials open access? Yes, fully. All articles are free to read, funded by an article processing charge of CHF 2,600 as displayed by MDPI when this profile was prepared, with institutional and society discounts possible.

What is its impact factor? MDPI displayed 3.7 for 2025, with a 5-year figure of 3.8, JCR Q2 in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary, and CiteScore Q1 in Condensed Matter Physics.

How fast is Materials? MDPI reports medians of about 14.4 days to first decision and 3.6 days from acceptance to publication for papers published in the first half of 2026. Individual papers vary.

Is Materials listed in DOAJ? This could not be verified: repeated DOAJ search API checks for ISSN 1996-1944 returned no record in this run, and OpenAlex also flags the source as not in DOAJ. Verify directly with DOAJ if your funder requires it.

Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the journal identified by ISSN 1996-1944, published by MDPI. Description, scope, affiliations, indexing, ranks, speed statistics and companion titles are taken from MDPI's own journal pages; the article processing charge is taken from MDPI's own APC page for the journal and preferred over a differing aggregator conversion, which is noted in the text; bibliometric totals come from a direct OpenAlex source reading (S18714766) taken for this profile. Where a claim could not be verified from a source in hand — notably DOAJ listing — this profile says so rather than asserting it.