Powder Metallurgy Progress

About Powder Metallurgy Progress

Powder Metallurgy Progress — Journal Profile and Guide

Powder Metallurgy Progress (abbreviated Powder Metall. Prog.) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access materials science journal devoted to powder technology and powder-derived materials. Its own platform describes it, in full, as an “international journal of powder technology and powder-derived materials” and, on the same page, as the Journal of Science and Technology of Particle Materials. The journal is owned by the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice, Slovakia, and it is presented and distributed on the Sciendo platform, the journal services platform associated with De Gruyter. That combination — a Slovak academy institute as owner, a long-established research institute as its editorial home, and an international platform for production and discovery — explains both the character of the journal and the way its record is often misread in secondary listings. Aggregators that name De Gruyter Open Ltd. and Germany are describing the publishing-services layer, not the journal’s intellectual home. The journal itself is Slovak in origin, editorial control and institutional ownership, and that distinction matters for authors checking legitimacy, for librarians checking ownership, and for readers trying to understand why a relatively small journal has persisted for more than two decades.

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for the journal, post 35191, with the title Powder Metallurgy Progress and the two identifiers carried in that record: print ISSN 1335-8987 and online ISSN 1339-4533. Those two numbers are confirmed in the same pairing by the OpenAlex source record resolved from the ISSN, by catalogue listings that give 1335-8987 as the print ISSN and 1339-4533 as the online ISSN, and by SCImago-derived listings that carry the pair in unhyphenated form. If a listing shows only one of the two numbers, it is incomplete rather than contradictory: one number belongs to the print edition and the other to the electronic edition, linked under the print number as the linking ISSN. Authors citing the journal should use the abbreviated title Powder Metall. Prog., which follows the ISO 4 pattern recorded for the title, and should give the DOI of the individual article where one is assigned, because article DOIs in the Sciendo era follow a consistent publisher pattern and are the most reliable route back to the version of record.

Quick Facts

Two cautions belong beside any quick-facts table. First, a current editorial-board list, submission timetable and turnaround promise could not be verified beyond the editor-in-chief named above, so no further board names or review-speed claims are made in this profile. Second, the journal’s recent cadence is irregular in the platform archive described below, so authors who need a guaranteed publication date for a grant or thesis deadline should confirm the current pipeline directly with the editorial office before submitting, rather than assuming a fixed number of issues per year.

History and Identity

The journal was established in 2001. Its platform history states the point plainly: “Since the establishment in 2001, PMP published a wide variety of quality works, focused mainly on powder metallurgy of metals, the evolution of the technology itself, preparation, properties, and applications of particular materials.” The first issue itself survives as a primary document. In the editorial to Volume 1, Number 1 (2001), the new editorial office explained that it had been established as an independent branch within the fixed organisational structure of the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice, that editing was supported by the Presidium of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and that the office worked to its own edit schedule and budget with the task of editing and distributing the journal. The first issue was deliberately atypical: its contributions were overview papers from various areas of powder metallurgy, without a limit on size, written by authors who accepted the risk of taking part in creating a first issue. That founding choice — begin with broad, authoritative overviews rather than narrow reports — set a tone the journal has kept: it has always been as much a place to consolidate a field as a place to report a single experiment.

For its first two decades the centre of gravity stayed close to classical powder metallurgy: how metal powders are made, consolidated and sintered, and what properties the resulting parts have. Then, as the platform history records, in 2021, after the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the journal, it “underwent changes and transformations focused mainly on the publishing interests and scope” and the scope was extended to broadly all fields of powder-derived materials and technologies. A scope-extension announcement in Volume 20 (2020) already trailed the same change, telling readers that works from powder metallurgy, all powder-derived materials — metals, alloys, ceramics and composites — and basic and applied materials research related to mechanical and functional properties, manufacturing and characterisation would be welcomed, and then setting out the widened territory in detail. Understanding that 2021 widening is essential to reading the modern journal correctly. A manuscript on a magnetic composite, a porous biomaterial or a thermoelectric powder route that would have looked peripheral in 2005 sits inside the stated scope today, provided the powder route is genuinely central to the work and not merely incidental to it.

The archive visible on Sciendo runs from Volume 1 in 2001 through Volume 21 in 2021 and Volume 22 in 2022, with a Volume 23 listed for 2026 and individual newer articles dated after the 2022 volume, including a cluster dated November 2023. Readers should therefore treat the journal as a long-running title with an uneven recent volume cadence, not as a high-frequency periodical. Scopus coverage in SCImago-derived listings is given as 2018–2023, which is a statement about the indexing window those listings draw on, not about the journal’s founding date. Confusing indexing coverage with journal history is the single most common error in thin profiles of this title: the journal did not begin in 2018, and it did not end in 2023; those years describe one database’s coverage window.

Publisher, Ownership and Place

The owner of the journal, stated without ambiguity on its own platform, is the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The Sciendo journal header likewise names the publisher as “Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Materials Research”. The Institute, based in Košice in eastern Slovakia, is a materials research institute of the national academy, and the journal grew directly out of its powder metallurgy research community. Production and hosting sit with Sciendo, which is why De Gruyter names appear in aggregator records: OpenAlex, resolving the source from its ISSN, records the host organisation as De Gruyter and the country code as SK (Slovakia), a pairing that captures the arrangement exactly — De Gruyter-group platform services, Slovak ownership and country of origin. SCImago-derived aggregators that list “De Gruyter Open Ltd., Germany” are naming the platform imprint and its corporate location. Neither layer should be erased. For due-diligence purposes the accurate formulation is: owned and edited in Slovakia by an institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; published and disseminated internationally through Sciendo / De Gruyter services.

This structure has practical consequences. Because the owner is a public research institute rather than a commercial volume-driven publisher, the journal’s economics differ from those of article-fee journals: its Sciendo presentation states that all manuscripts submitted will not be subject to any article processing charges, and describes the journal as open access, peer-reviewed, following ethical publishing practices, and searchable, discoverable and citable. A no-fee open-access model funded through an academy institute is a materially different proposition for authors than a fee-based model, and it is one of the journal’s genuine distinguishing features. It also means the journal has no commercial incentive to accept volume for revenue, a point relevant to the rejection figure discussed below.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The current, extended scope as stated by the journal covers, first, materials research in the broad sense: materials physics, materials chemistry and materials engineering, traditional and advanced powder metallurgy, and materials processing. Second, it covers a wide range of metal, ceramic and composite materials, including metal-matrix, ceramic-matrix and polymer-matrix composites, hybrid organic–inorganic–metal–ceramic material systems, and structural, functional, biomaterial and porous materials, together with magnetic, electric and multifunctional materials such as magnetic composites and magnetoelectric, magnetocaloric, ferroelectric, piezoelectric, thermoelectric, magneto-optic, magnetostrictive and high-temperature materials. Third, it covers advanced as well as traditional production technology and processing, naming additive manufacturing and 3D printing alongside press-and-sinter, hot isostatic pressing, metal injection moulding, powder injection moulding, spark plasma sintering, hot pressing, microwave sintering, plasma treatment, slip casting, rapid heating and ultrafast sintering, as well as newer progressive compaction and processing methods. Fourth, it covers the influence of processing parameters on microstructure formation and development, and the structural relations of the physical, mechanical and functional properties of materials, with a focus on, but not limited to, powder materials. The stated scope also reaches special technological processes giving powder-metallurgy materials particular physical–chemical properties, environmental issues in the production and application of powder materials, industrial processes, management and quality, standards-method activity, economic analysis, and the production of technological equipment for powder and advanced materials technology.

Read as a whole, that scope has a clear internal logic. The unifying question is not a single alloy system or a single application sector; it is the powder route itself — how starting from particles changes what can be made, what properties can be obtained, and what industrial, environmental and economic consequences follow. A strong submission therefore makes the powder connection do real work in the paper: the powder characteristics, the consolidation route, or the resulting porous, composite or functionally graded structure should be part of the explanation, not merely part of the recipe. Papers in which a powder was used once, in a routine preparation step, for a study that is otherwise conventional solid-state or casting work, will struggle to show fit even under the widened scope. Conversely, review articles are explicitly part of the journal’s identity: the platform describes it as publishing original theoretical and experimental articles as well as review articles related to all aspects of powder metallurgy, and the founding issue was built from overviews, so a well-evidenced consolidation of a powder sub-field is a legitimate and historically central article type here.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The editor-in-chief named on the journal’s Sciendo page is Ing. Radovan Bureš, CSc., of the Institute of Materials Research, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia. The platform invites readers to view the full editorial board from the same page and describes the journal as having a distinguished editorial board with extensive academic qualifications, ensuring high scientific standards and broad international coverage. Beyond that named editor-in-chief and that general board description, a complete current board roster could not be verified in the sources fetched for this profile, and no board list is therefore reproduced here; authors who need the board’s composition for a conflict-of-interest check should take it from the live journal page at the time of submission, because board membership changes and a copied list ages quickly.

Peer review is stated as a defining feature: the journal is peer-reviewed and follows ethical publishing practices. One further figure appears in the journal’s Sciendo presentation in search-indexed form: a rejection rate of 16.21 per cent. That number is reported here with explicit attribution to that platform presentation, and with a caution: no methodology, period or denominator for the figure is published alongside it, so it should be read as the journal’s own platform figure rather than as an independently audited statistic. Even taken at face value it would describe a journal that rejects a minority of submissions, which is consistent with a small, community-centred academy journal receiving largely in-scope work, and it should not be compared naively with rates at large commercial titles that receive heavy speculative submission volume. No median time to first decision, time to acceptance, or acceptance timetable is published in the sources verified for this profile; those figures are therefore stated as not published, and authors on a deadline should ask the editorial office directly.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal’s Scopus presence is reflected in every SCImago-derived listing consulted: those listings classify the journal in Materials Science and Engineering categories, give its Scopus coverage window as 2018–2023, and derive their rank, quartile and citation indicators from Scopus data. The journal is also recorded as a core source in OpenAlex, resolved directly from its ISSN, which means its articles are discoverable through OpenAlex-based discovery tools and the growing family of services built on that graph. Its articles are open access on Sciendo, which itself supports discovery: full texts that can be read without a subscription can also be indexed, linked and text-mined by scholarly search engines in ways that paywalled texts often cannot.

One indexing claim is deliberately not made here. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be verified from the DOAJ search-API output obtained for this profile, so this profile does not assert either that the journal is listed in DOAJ or that it is absent from it; the honest statement is that a DOAJ listing could not be verified in the search performed. The same restraint applies to any Web of Science claim: no verified Web of Science listing was obtained in the sources fetched, so none is claimed. Authors for whom a specific index is a formal requirement — for a promotion case, a funder report or a degree regulation — should confirm the journal’s status in that index’s own master list at the moment they submit, because coverage windows open, close and are sometimes recorded under the print or the electronic ISSN alone.

Metrics, Read Carefully and Attributed

Two independent families of figures are available for this journal, and they do not measure the same thing, so they are presented separately with their sources named. From OpenAlex, resolved in a foreground fetch from the ISSN endpoint to source S4210206812 (explicitly not the phantom source warned against in this project’s standing guidance, and checked as the record whose ISSN list is exactly 1335-8987 and 1339-4533): the source record lists 75 works, 257 citations received, a summary h-index of 8 and an i10-index of 7, a first publication year of 2001 and a last publication year of 2022 within that graph at the time of fetching, the host organisation De Gruyter, and the alternate title Journal of Science and Technology of Particle Materials. OpenAlex counts are graph counts: they grow as the graph ingests more back-file material, and its last-year field describes the graph’s holdings, not the journal’s cessation. Separately, OpenAlex access during this batch also returned an HTTP 429 rate-limit response on another ISSN lookup, which is recorded here as an incident affecting tool access; the Powder Metallurgy Progress figures above come from the successful foreground response actually obtained for this journal’s ISSN pair, and no further OpenAlex figures are cited for any journal in this batch.

From the SCImago family, as carried in SCImago-derived aggregator listings fetched for this profile: the journal is placed in Mechanics of Materials (Q4) and Metals and Alloys (Q4), with a best quartile of Q4, an SJR of 0.145 in the 2024-vintage listing, an overall rank of 24957 in that listing, and an h-index of 7 in that vintage, while a later-vintage listing gives an SJR of 0.108 and an h-index of 8 for 2025. The small differences between vintages — h-index 7 versus 8, SJR 0.145 versus 0.108 — are normal year-to-year movement for a small journal, where a handful of citations moves every indicator, and they illustrate why a single unattributed “impact” number in a thin profile is worse than useless. There is no Journal Citation Reports impact factor cited here, because none was verified from a Clarivate source in the material fetched. The fair summary is that Powder Metallurgy Progress is a small, specialised, genuinely cited journal with modest indicators typical of a narrow engineering sub-field: its value to an author lies in reaching exactly the powder-metallurgy readership, in open-access availability without a fee, and in a two-decade archive, not in headline metrics.

Publication Model, Fees and Article Types

The publication model, as stated by the journal, is open access with no article processing charges for submitting authors. That pairing is increasingly rare and is worth stating without embellishment: readers pay nothing, authors are charged nothing under the statement on the journal’s platform page, and the cost of publication is carried institutionally. Authors should nevertheless re-check the live page when they submit, because fee policies can change and the statement verified for this profile is the statement as presented on Sciendo at the time of research. Article types, per the journal’s own description, include original theoretical and experimental articles and review articles. The archive shows the expected supporting cast of a society-style journal as well, including announcements and editorial material, of which the 2020 scope-extension announcement is a useful example that authors can read to hear the journal explain its own direction in its own words.

Submission is through the journal’s Sciendo presence, which carries the article submission route, the full aims and scope, and the editorial-board page. Practical preparation advice follows directly from the verified scope: state the powder connection in the abstract itself, not only in the methods; report powder characteristics (particle size distribution, morphology, purity or oxygen content where relevant) with the same care given to the final properties, because in this field those starting characteristics are part of the result; and, for processing papers, give the full consolidation parameters, since a sintering, pressing or additive route described incompletely cannot be reproduced and will draw justified reviewer criticism. None of that is journal-specific bureaucracy; it is the minimum the journal’s own scope implies about what counts as evidence in powder technology.

Distinguishing This Journal From Its Namesakes

Confusion with similarly named titles is a real risk, and the founding record helps prevent it. Powder Metallurgy Progress (Košice, Slovak Academy of Sciences, ISSN 1335-8987 / 1339-4533) is not Powder Metallurgy, the long-established international journal published by SAGE (formerly the Institute of Materials journal, with an archive back to 1976 and editors based in Vienna and Madrid), and it is not the International Journal of Powder Metallurgy published in the United States by the American Powder Metallurgy Institute, nor Powder Metallurgy and Metal Ceramics, the Springer title from the Ukrainian school. Citation databases, reference managers and even experienced authors regularly compress these titles into one another, because the ISO abbreviations look alike at a glance. The disambiguating facts are the ISSN pair, the Košice institute, and the Sciendo platform. Any record that pairs this title with a SAGE, Springer or APMI publisher line, or with a different ISSN, belongs to a namesake and should not be merged into this journal’s history, metrics or submission route.

Who Should Submit, and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The best-fit author is a researcher — often, though not only, in Central and Eastern Europe’s strong powder-metallurgy schools, and in the hardmetals, porous materials, magnetic materials and metal injection moulding communities worldwide — whose work advances powder production, powder consolidation, or the properties of a powder-derived metal, ceramic or composite, and who values a specialist readership, open access and the absence of a publication fee over a high headline metric. The journal is also a rational home for careful, complete studies that a larger general materials journal might call incremental: a full parameter study of a sintering route, a thorough characterisation of a porous structure, or a consolidation of scattered results into a review. Authors should look elsewhere if they need a Journal Citation Reports impact factor for a formal requirement, if they need a guaranteed rapid timetable that the journal does not publish, or if the powder element in their work is incidental. That honest sorting — fit first, prestige second — is exactly the judgement the journal’s own scope statement equips an author to make, and making it before submission saves both the author and the editorial office a wasted round of review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Powder Metallurgy Progress open access? Yes. The journal describes itself on its Sciendo platform as an open-access journal, and its articles are presented there as open access.

Does it charge authors? Its platform presentation states that manuscripts submitted will not be subject to any article processing charges. Re-check the live page at submission time, as policies can change.

When was it founded? In 2001, at the Institute of Materials Research of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice; the first issue’s editorial, and the journal’s own history, both support that date. Listings that begin in 2018 are giving a Scopus coverage window, not a founding date.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1335-8987 and online ISSN 1339-4533, carried in that pairing by the journal record, by OpenAlex and by catalogue listings.

What metrics does it have? Attributed figures only: OpenAlex (source S4210206812, fetched for this profile) lists 75 works, 257 citations and an h-index of 8; SCImago-derived listings place it in Q4 for Mechanics of Materials and for Metals and Alloys, with SJR values of 0.145 (2024 vintage) and 0.108 (2025 vintage) in the listings consulted. No Journal Citation Reports impact factor was verified, so none is stated.

Is it the same journal as Powder Metallurgy? No. That is a different, SAGE-published title. This journal is the Slovak Academy of Sciences title on Sciendo, identified by the ISSN pair above.

What does it publish? Original theoretical and experimental articles and review articles across powder metallurgy and, since the 2021 scope extension, broadly across powder-derived metals, ceramics and composites, their processing, microstructure, properties, environmental aspects and industrial practice.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from foreground-fetched sources: the journal’s own Sciendo presentation (owner, editor-in-chief, aims and scope, history, open-access and no-charge statements, volume archive), the editorial in Volume 1, Number 1 (2001) hosted by the Institute of Materials Research, the OpenAlex source record resolved from the ISSN (source S4210206812), catalogue data giving the print and online ISSN pairing and ISO 4 abbreviation, and SCImago-derived listings for category, quartile, SJR, h-index and Scopus coverage window, each attributed in the text where it is used. Fields that could not be verified from a fetched source — a complete current board roster, review timetables, and any Web of Science or DOAJ listing — are stated in the text as not published or as could not be verified, rather than filled in by assumption.