Metal Science and Heat Treatment

About Metal Science and Heat Treatment

Overview

Metal Science and Heat Treatment is a monthly, peer-reviewed journal of physical metallurgy, published in English by Springer in the United States, and it is — a fact that defines everything about it — a translation journal. It is the English-language edition of the Russian journal Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov, and it has performed that translation role since 1959, carrying the work of Russian and other metallurgical schools to readers who do not read Russian. Springer's own description is compact: the journal discusses fundamental and practical issues of physical metallurgy, new achievements in the heat treatment of alloys, surface engineering and heat-treatment equipment, and publishes review papers as well as special issues on the state of the art and future development of heat treatment, the history of physical metallurgy, and its outstanding researchers. For a directory reader the short summary is: a long-running, subscription-based Springer translation journal, print ISSN 0026-0673, electronic ISSN 1573-8973, covering steels, alloys and their thermal processing, with an editorial home in the Russian metallurgical establishment and a publication home in Springer's New York operation.

Identification is anchored by the ISSN pair, which Springer, the JournalsWorld record and every database consulted agree on: 0026-0673 (print) and 1573-8973 (electronic). On the Springer platform it is journal number 11041, and its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.1007/s11041 — for example 10.1007/s11041-025-01164-z, a 2025 article whose citation line also shows the journal's standard abbreviation, Met Sci Heat Treat, and records that the article was translated from Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov, issue 5 of 2025. A full twin check was run for this post before this profile was written, and its closest call deserves a sentence here: a deep JournalsWorld profile titled Heat Treatment of Metals (post 342791) mentions this journal's ISSNs, but it is a different, ceased British practitioner journal whose own ISSN is 0305-4829 — a mention, not a twin, of exactly the kind that ISSN-based checking exists to catch. This profile is built from Springer's own journal and aims-and-scope pages, the journal's OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint, a Directory of Open Access Journals search-API check, and SCImago-derived listings, each consulted directly; figures are attributed to their source, and anything that could not be verified is stated as such.

Identity, History and the Translation Model

The journal began in 1959 — the founding year given in bibliographic listings consulted for this profile, and corroborated by the volume arithmetic: volume 67 fell in 2025, which is exactly where a journal founded in 1959 should be. Scopus-derived coverage listings likewise give 1959 as the start of coverage. Its earlier English title form, Metal Science and Heat Treatment of Metals, appears in listings as a former name; the current short title is the one Springer uses today. But the deeper history is the Russian journal's: the English edition exists because Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov — the title means, literally, metal science and the heat treatment of metals — was and is a central journal of Russian physical metallurgy, and the Cold-War-era decision to translate it cover to cover created a channel through which Western engineers followed Soviet and then Russian work on steels, heat treatment and physical metallurgy. The channel never closed: the Russian volume year is still published in English, beginning each April, as Springer states on its aims page.

That model has consequences a reader should understand. The English journal's contents are the Russian journal's contents, translated: its authors are overwhelmingly the Russian journal's authors, its editorial judgements are made in the Russian editorial office in the first instance, and its publication rhythm carries a translation lag embodied in the April start of the English volume year. Springer is the English edition's publisher and distributor — the imprint history runs through Kluwer Academic and Plenum, whose names older listings still carry, into today's Springer Science+Business Media — while the Russian side is represented in the copyright line Springer itself prints for the journal: the Russian Authors' Society, Mashinostroenie Publishers, and Skoromnikova, a name that reappears as the journal's managing editor in the editorial listing below. Authors who imagine they are submitting to a conventional American journal should recalibrate: this is a Russian journal in English dress, and proud of it — its value to readers outside Russia is precisely that the dress exists.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

The editorial listing reproduced from the journal's own pages in the sources consulted names V. S. Kraposhin of Bauman Moscow State Technical University as editor-in-chief; S. Yu. Kondrat'ev of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University as deputy editor-in-chief; and L. B. Skoromnikova of Folium Publishers as managing editor, with an editorial board drawn from Russian technical universities and institutes — among them the National University of Science and Technology MISiS, Ural Federal University, Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University and the Institute of Machines Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences — together with members in Slovakia, Poland and Germany. That board composition is the journal in miniature: the senior metallurgy chairs of the Russian technical-university system, with a light international fringe. Because editorial listings change and the version consulted is a reproduction of the journal's listing in a secondary source, readers who need the current office-holders for correspondence should confirm them on Springer's journal pages; the names above are given as the journal's editorial leadership in the listing consulted for this profile, which is also the listing its recent volumes carry.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Springer's aims-and-scope page states the journal's business in a sentence — it presents new fundamental and practical research in physical metallurgy, heat-treatment equipment and surface engineering — and then lists the topics it covers, which this profile reproduces because no paraphrase improves them: new structural, high-temperature, tool and precision steels; cold-resistant, corrosion-resistant and radiation-resistant steels; steels with rapid decline of induced properties; alloys with a shape-memory effect; bulk-amorphisable metal alloys; microcrystalline alloys; and nanomaterials and foam materials for medical use. The longer description adds the standing departments of the field: structure at all length scales, physical and mechanical properties, thermal and deformation processing of metallic materials, and studies of the relationship between processing, structure and properties — theoretical and experimental, including validated modelling — across all classes of metallic materials: composite and powder-based materials, nanocrystalline and amorphous materials, their phase composition and transformations, mechanical behaviour, solidification, welding and coatings.

The OpenAlex topic profile of the source, at the time of checking, corroborates that scope from the citation side: its leading topics are microstructure and mechanical properties of steels; metallurgical and alloy processes; metal alloys, wear and properties; high-temperature alloys and creep; and surface treatment and coatings. This is a journal for metallurgists in the classical sense — scientists and engineers whose object is the internal structure of metals and alloys and whose lever is heat. Work on polymers, ceramics as a main subject, electronic materials or biomaterials other than the metallic foam and nanomaterials named in the scope sits outside its centre, and the journal's own topic list, with steel named in four of its seven bullets, tells prospective contributors exactly where the centre is.

Metrics — Attributed Figures

The SCImago record for the journal, in its 2025 data as consulted through SCImago-derived listings, gives a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.187 with Q4 positions in condensed matter physics, mechanics of materials and metals and alloys; an h-index of 35; 100 total documents in 2025 against 333 across the latest three years; and citations per document (two years) of 0.61. Journal Citation Reports figures reported in the same listings give an impact factor of 0.6 for the latest reported year — 0.610 in the 2025 reading against 0.510 in 2024 in the SciJournal compilation of SCImago and JCR data. The older stored JournalsWorld summary for this post gave an impact factor of 0.6 and an h-index of 35, and for once the stored h-index agrees with the SCImago figure consulted directly, although the profile relies on the consulted sources rather than the stored summary.

OpenAlex tells a longer story in different units. Resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint gives a single source (S24800950) with 12,175 works and 29,277 citations, an h-index of 44, an i10-index of 672 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.87 — an h-index notably higher than SCImago's 35, because OpenAlex counts the journal's whole indexed run and citation graph on its own definitions, where SCImago counts within Scopus's. Neither is wrong; they are different instruments, and this profile reports both with their makers named, which is the only honest way to quote journal metrics. The interpretation that matters is simpler than the numbers: this is a large, old, low-citation-density journal. A monthly that has published well over twelve thousand items since 1959 in a field — industrial metallurgy — whose papers are read in works laboratories more than they are cited in universities, will show exactly the profile these figures show: deep archive, modest per-paper citations, and influence that runs through practice.

Indexing and Discoverability

Springer's journal-information panel lists the services in which the journal is abstracted and indexed, and this profile reproduces that publisher list: the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), the BFI List, Baidu, CLOCKSS, CNKI, CNPIEC, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), Current Contents / Engineering, Computing and Technology, Dimensions, EBSCO, EI Compendex, Gale, Google Scholar, INIS Atomindex, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST), Naver, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, Portico, ProQuest, SCImago, SCOPUS, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Semantic Scholar, TD Net Discovery Service, Wanfang and eLibrary.ru. For a metallurgy journal the entries that carry professional weight are EI Compendex and CAS on the engineering and chemistry side, and SCIE and Scopus on the citation side; the journal is present in all four. A Directory of Open Access Journals search-API check for both ISSNs returned no listing at the time of checking, as expected: this is a subscription journal, and DOAJ lists open-access titles.

Fees and Access

Metal Science and Heat Treatment is a subscription journal. Its normal route to readers is the institutional subscription, in print and online, through Springer, and its articles sit behind that subscription except where individual open-access arrangements apply. No article processing charge for the title was listed in the OpenAlex record consulted (the APC field was empty), and no fee schedule could be verified from the publisher pages consulted for this profile; this profile therefore states the charge position as could not be verified, and authors considering an open-access option for a translated article should raise it with the editorial office and Springer directly, since the translation model means rights and options may sit with the Russian edition in the first instance.

How to Submit — Read This Section Carefully

Submission guidance for this journal must begin from its translation model, because it changes what "submit" means. The English journal's content originates in the Russian journal: the route for a manuscript is therefore the Russian editorial office's route, in Russian in the ordinary case, and the practical first step for any prospective contributor is the journal's own page on the Springer site and the Russian journal's author instructions, which state the current submission system, language requirements and article categories. Those operational details could not all be verified from the pages accessible for this profile and are not restated here as fact. What the verified record supports is fit guidance. The journal states that all articles are peer-reviewed, so a submission is a research paper entering review, not a contribution to a magazine. Its scope bullets define the fit test tightly: steels and alloys, their structure and properties, and their thermal and thermomechanical processing. And its topics list warns off adjacent fields: a paper whose centre is a coating process, a welding method or a corrosion result belongs here only when its heart is the metal and its heat treatment, since neighbouring Springer translation journals — the journal names its own broader family through shared indexing and readership, titles such as Metallurgist, Physics of Metals and Metallography and Powder Metallurgy and Metal Ceramics — divide the wider territory among themselves.

Who This Journal Is For

For readers, the journal serves metallurgists, heat-treatment engineers and materials scientists who need the Russian literature without the language barrier — a service no database alert replaces, because the value lies in complete, professionally translated papers, including the practical, plant-facing work that Russian industrial institutes publish and that English-language journals rarely carry. For libraries, it is the standing English record of a national school of physical metallurgy whose output since 1959 would otherwise be largely closed to non-Russian readers. For authors inside that school, it is the English face of their home journal. For authors outside it, the honest advice is that this is seldom the natural first venue: its editorial system, language pipeline and readership are built around the Russian journal, and a manuscript written in English for an international audience will usually find a faster and more predictable route in a non-translation metallurgy title — while a manuscript written for the Russian journal gains, through this edition, a second, English-language life that few national journals anywhere can offer their authors.

Similar Journals

The natural comparison set is the family of Springer English editions of Russian materials journals: Metallurgist, for extractive and process metallurgy; Physics of Metals and Metallography, for the physics side of the same science; Powder Metallurgy and Metal Ceramics, for the powder route to metallic materials; the Russian Journal of Non-Ferrous Metals, for the non-ferrous world this journal touches less; and Steel Research International, a non-Russian comparator for steel research in English. Two further titles appeared in this post's twin check and are distinguished here to prevent catalogue confusion: HTM — Journal of Heat Treatment and Materials (JournalsWorld post 412308), the German heat-treatment profession's bilingual journal, which shares subject matter but neither publisher nor ISSNs; and Heat Treatment of Metals (post 342791), the ceased quarterly of the Wolfson Heat Treatment Centre at Aston University, own ISSN 0305-4829, which mentions this journal only as a neighbouring title. Neither is a duplicate of this record; each is a separate journal that a careless search could mistake for one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Metal Science and Heat Treatment?
Print ISSN 0026-0673 and electronic ISSN 1573-8973, as given in Springer's journal-information panel and on the JournalsWorld record. On the Springer platform it is journal number 11041, with DOIs under 10.1007/s11041.

Who publishes the journal?
Springer publishes the English edition in the United States (host organisation Springer Science+Business Media in the OpenAlex record). It is a translation of the Russian journal Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov; Springer's copyright line for the journal names the Russian Authors' Society, Mashinostroenie Publishers and Skoromnikova on the Russian side.

When was the journal founded?
In 1959, the founding year in the bibliographic listings consulted and the year from which Scopus-derived coverage is given; its volume numbering agrees (volume 67 in 2025). The Russian volume year is published in English beginning each April.

What does the journal publish?
Peer-reviewed fundamental and practical research in physical metallurgy, heat treatment of alloys, surface engineering and heat-treatment equipment — with a stated topic list centred on structural, high-temperature, tool and precision steels, resistant steels of several kinds, shape-memory alloys, bulk-amorphisable and microcrystalline alloys, and metallic nanomaterials and foams — monthly, in English translation.

What are its metrics?
By source: SCImago's 2025 data give an SJR of 0.187 (Q4 in its categories), an h-index of 35 and citations per document (two years) of 0.61, and reported Journal Impact Factor values stand at 0.6 in the latest reported year; OpenAlex, counting differently, records 12,175 works, 29,277 citations and an h-index of 44. The databases disagree because they count differently, and the figures are quoted with attribution for that reason.

Is the journal open access?
No. It is a subscription journal; a DOAJ search-API check for its ISSNs returned no listing at the time of checking, and no article processing charge could be verified from the sources consulted.

Can I submit a paper written in English directly to this journal?
Treat that as a question for the editorial office, not as an assumption. The journal's content originates in its Russian edition, so the submission route runs through that edition's system and instructions; start from the journal's Springer page and the Russian journal's author guidance, and confirm the route for English-language manuscripts before preparing one.