Refractories and Industrial Ceramics

About Refractories and Industrial Ceramics

About Refractories and Industrial Ceramics

Refractories and Industrial Ceramics is an English-language materials-science journal published by Springer. Its print ISSN is 1083-4877 and its electronic ISSN is 1573-9139. It publishes six issues a year, a bimonthly rhythm recorded consistently across its bibliographic records. The journal is the English translation journal for Russian-language research on refractories and technical ceramics: its articles carry the notice Translated from Ogneupory, with the original issue and page numbers, in its earlier decades, and its later content translates the successor Russian literature, including Ogneupory i Tekhnicheskaya Keramika (Refractories and Technical Ceramics) and Novye Ogneupory (New Refractories). Understanding that translation identity is essential. This is not a general ceramics journal that happens to publish Russian authors; it is the principal English window onto the Russian and wider post-Soviet refractory research tradition, a tradition rooted in the metallurgical industries of the Urals, Siberia and the industrial regions of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Refractory materials are the heat-resistant linings and components that make high-temperature industry possible: the bricks, castables, mortars and monolithic linings of steelmaking vessels, blast furnaces, glass tanks, cement kilns, coke ovens and non-ferrous metallurgy furnaces, and the industrial ceramics that must survive thermal shock, slag corrosion, abrasion and sustained load at temperatures that destroy ordinary materials. A journal devoted to them serves both materials scientists and the plant engineers whose furnaces fail when a lining fails. Refractories and Industrial Ceramics has served that readership in English since the translation programme began, with the journal's own publication history commonly dated to 1960, and with the Springer record consulted through its bibliographic listings showing continuous coverage into the present century; the Journals World stored record shows coverage from 1996 to 2024 in its Scopus-derived window, which is a database coverage statement, not the journal's full lifespan.

Identity, publisher and bibliographic record

The publisher is Springer, recorded as such by OpenAlex, which gives the host organisation as Springer Science+Business Media, the country as the United States, and the journal homepage on Springer's platform, and by secondary bibliographic records that list the publisher address as One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004, United States. The Journals World stored record matches that picture: publisher term corresponding to Springer, country United States, six issues a year in its underlying records, and category Q4 in its stored classification. The journal's article DOIs sit under Springer's prefixes, historically 10.1007/BF and 10.1023/A for older translated articles and 10.1007/s11148 for modern content, where 11148 is the journal's Springer journal number, visible in its homepage address. A modern citation, for example a 2020 thermal-calculation paper at volume 60, pages 558 to 560, carries DOI 10.1007/s11148-020-00406-2, and that pattern helps readers verify that a supposed article in this journal is genuine.

The translation lineage deserves a fuller record because cataloguers and systematic reviewers trip over it. The original Russian journal Ogneupory (Refractories) supplied the content for the English journal titled Refractories in its earliest form, and as the Russian title and the field broadened to embrace technical and industrial ceramics, the English title settled as Refractories and Industrial Ceramics. Individual articles state their source explicitly: a 1985 paper on selecting a refractory coating is translated from Ogneupory number 2, pages 19 to 22, February 1985; a 1978 paper on the hot-wire method of determining thermal conductivity is translated from Ogneupory number 9, pages 30 to 33, September 1978; and a 2001 paper on high-alumina castables draws on Ogneupory i Tekhnicheskaya Keramika number 6 of 2000. Authors citing the English version should cite the English journal, volume and DOI, and may add the Russian original where their argument depends on it; libraries should not treat the English and Russian editions as duplicate subscriptions, because their readerships barely overlap.

No editor-in-chief name is asserted in this profile, because no current editorial-board page from the publisher was in hand in the foreground sources consulted, and naming an editor from an outdated secondary listing would risk exactly the kind of stale attribution this directory works to avoid. The editorial information that can be stated safely is structural: the journal is produced within Springer's materials-science programme as a translation journal, its content originates predominantly from Russian-language submissions to its Russian counterpart titles, and author instructions for the English edition should be sought on Springer's journal page rather than assumed from the practice of Springer's primary-research journals.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal focuses on advancing the science and technology of refractory materials and industrial ceramics, with emphasis on research and practical applications in high-temperature environments. Its recurring subject areas, visible across its aims descriptions and its published archive, begin with the development and characterisation of refractory materials: synthesis, properties and applications of the oxide, carbon-containing, silicon carbide, zirconia, alumina, magnesia, chromite and other refractory systems used in steelmaking, glass production, cement manufacture and related processes. Raw materials research belongs here too, including studies of natural deposits for refractory production, such as an investigation of quartzites of the Koitashskoe deposit for their applicability to dinas (silica refractory) parts, which tested devitrification behaviour, refractoriness, heat resistance, water absorption and porosity against the applicable state standard.

A second area is ceramic processing and production technology: sintering, forming, binding systems, highly concentrated ceramic binding suspensions, castables, coatings and joining, including work on gluing sintered silicon nitride parts and on penetrable ceramic filter materials based on low-melting clays with controlled pore structure. A third area covers properties and performance in service: thermal conductivity measurement, high-temperature creep and the role of structural characteristics in creep of ceramics, heat resistance and thermal shock, corrosion and wear by slags and melts, abrasion at elevated temperature, and the wear of tunnel-kiln wall linings, where one study established plastic-deformation after-effects, spalling and scouring in working zones as the most important wear factors and recommended lining compositions and temperature thresholds for normalising kiln operation. A fourth area is plant practice and service experience: production and service reports on materials in blast-furnace runners, steel ladles and industrial furnaces, where the evidence is operational as much as experimental and where the journal's practitioner readership is most directly served. Environmental and resource questions, including the use of industrial waste in refractory and ceramic production, appear within these areas rather than as a separate programme.

Read as a whole, the archive has a distinctive texture that authors and readers should expect: state standards (GOST references) appear as test frameworks, institute affiliations such as the national Institute of Refractories and the Ural Polytechnic Institute anchor the older literature, and plant authors from steelworks and refractory manufacturers publish alongside academy institutes. That mixture of academy, institute and plant authorship is a strength for anyone studying how refractory knowledge actually moves between laboratory and furnace, and it makes the journal a primary historical source for Soviet and post-Soviet high-temperature materials practice as well as a current research venue.

Access, article types and how the journal is used

Refractories and Industrial Ceramics is a subscription journal in Springer's catalogue, not an open-access title. A foreground search of the Directory of Open Access Journals for ISSN 1083-4877 returned no record, consistent with that model, and secondary records likewise record open access as No for this journal. Access is therefore normally through institutional SpringerLink subscriptions, with individual articles purchasable and with abstracts freely readable. Its content is overwhelmingly translated research articles, typically concise, data-dense papers of a few pages reporting compositions, test results and service observations, together with production-practice reports. The brevity is a genre feature inherited from the Russian originals and should not be mistaken for thinness: a three-page paper may carry a complete campaign of furnace-service data that exists nowhere else in English.

Because it is a translation journal, the usual author route differs from a standard Springer submission. Research reaches the English edition principally by being published in the Russian counterpart literature and selected for translation, rather than by direct English-language submission through the journal page, and authors outside that system should consult Springer's current journal page for the route that applies to them rather than assuming a standard manuscript portal. Reviewers, systematic reviewers and literature searchers, by contrast, should treat the English edition as a first-class source: search it under both its current title and its historical short title Refractories for older volumes, and under the Russian titles when checking whether an English translation exists.

Metrics and indexing, attributed and dated

OpenAlex provides the foreground bibliometric snapshot for this profile. Resolving ISSN 1083-4877 through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint returned source S109691728, Refractories and Industrial Ceramics, with ISSNs 1083-4877 and 1573-9139, host Springer Science+Business Media, country United States, 9,812 works and 14,396 citations, a summary h-index of 29 and an i10-index of 313, and a two-year mean citedness of 1.0 in that snapshot. The scale is the story: close to ten thousand translated works make this one of the largest bodies of refractory literature in English, and its citation totals reflect steady specialist use over decades rather than news-driven spikes.

The Journals World stored record carries an h-index of 23 and an impact factor figure of 0.3, and secondary services give differing snapshots, for example a CiteScore of 1.1, an h-index of 19 and a SNIP of 0.83 in one researcher-service summary, with SCImago-derived quartiles for this journal commonly in the Q3 to Q4 range by category and year. These figures are reported here strictly as attributed snapshots from different databases and years; they are not interchangeable, none of them is presented as a current Clarivate Journal Impact Factor verified from Journal Citation Reports, and any author or librarian who needs a specific metric for a specific year must take it from that year's edition of the relevant database. What can be said without qualification is that the journal is a long-established, Scopus-tracked Springer title whose metrics sit in the range typical of a narrow, industry-facing materials specialty, and that its value to its field is better judged by its archive depth and its translation function than by any single decimal.

Assessment and guidance for readers

For materials scientists, metallurgists and ceramic engineers, Refractories and Industrial Ceramics is close to indispensable for one task: finding what the Russian-language refractory tradition has established about a material, a test method or a furnace practice. Its translations preserve plant data, deposit studies and service reports that were never republished in Western journals, from quartzite assessments for silica refractories to castable performance in blast-furnace runners. For historians and sociologists of technology it is equally valuable as a continuous translated record of Soviet and Russian industrial materials practice from the Cold War period onward. Its limits follow from the same identity: coverage follows the Russian literature's agenda, publication in English follows the Russian original with a translation lag, and access requires a subscription.

Search the journal deliberately. Use material-system keywords (alumina, magnesia, dinas, castable, silicon nitride) with property keywords (creep, thermal conductivity, slag corrosion, thermal shock), check both the current and historical titles, follow the Translated from notes back to Russian originals where precision matters, and verify every citation against the Springer record and DOI. Librarians should file it with materials science and metallurgy, note its translation status in catalogue records so users understand the lag and the lineage, and treat its back archive as a research asset, not as superseded stock. On those terms this profile records a journal whose importance is easy to underestimate from its modest metric decimals and impossible to miss once its archive is actually searched.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Refractories and Industrial Ceramics? Print ISSN 1083-4877 and electronic ISSN 1573-9139. Who publishes it? Springer (Springer Science+Business Media), with the bibliographic country recorded as the United States. How often does it appear? Six issues a year. Is it open access? No. It is a subscription journal, and a foreground DOAJ search returned no listing. What is its relationship to Ogneupory? It is the English translation journal for the Russian refractory literature originating with Ogneupory and its successor titles on refractories and technical ceramics; articles state their Russian source. What are its metrics? OpenAlex source S109691728 records 9,812 works, 14,396 citations and an h-index of 29; the directory's stored record gives an h-index of 23 and an impact-factor figure of 0.3, and other services give different dated snapshots, each attributed in the metrics section above.

Historical depth: why the back archive matters

The older volumes of Refractories and Industrial Ceramics, under its historical short title and in its translation lineage from Ogneupory, document a complete industrial system. Soviet refractory research served integrated steel, glass and cement combines whose plant journals, institute reports and state standards formed a closed technical literature in Russian. The English translation journal was, for Western engineers during the Cold War and for international readers after it, the systematic opening in that wall. Papers on lining wear in tunnel kilns, on the density, surface tension and viscosity of oxide melts, on burnt-on sand in casting, and on the production experience of named refractory works carry data gathered at industrial scale over full furnace campaigns, a kind of evidence that laboratory studies cannot reproduce and that modern modelling still uses for validation. Discarding or ignoring that archive because its metric snapshots are modest would be a category mistake about what the journal is for.

Its treatment of standards is part of that value. Where a study tests a raw material or product against a GOST standard, the English text preserves the standard number, the measured properties and the pass judgement together, allowing later readers to reconstruct exactly what quality meant in that system at that date. The quartzite study for dinas production is a model of the genre: deposit, property suite, standard, verdict. Modern readers adapting such work must convert standards, units and material names with care, and must remember that a translated property term may carry the specific sense of the Russian technical vocabulary behind it. Those cautions argue for using the journal attentively, not for avoiding it.

For collection managers and research evaluators, the journal is a useful corrective to metric-led judgement. A translation journal's citations are dispersed across metallurgy, ceramics, mining, chemical engineering and industrial history, its readership includes plant engineers who apply results without citing them, and its most-used papers may be decades old. Judged by archive use, by uniqueness of content in English and by continuity of coverage from the Russian tradition, Refractories and Industrial Ceramics holds a position that its quartile snapshots only faintly describe. This profile therefore records its identifiers, publisher, frequency, translation lineage and attributed metrics together, so that a reader deciding whether to search it, cite it or keep it understands the whole record rather than a single number.

Translation lag and edition awareness complete the practical guidance. Because an English article follows its Russian original, the year of the English volume is the correct citation year for the translation, while the original year belongs in any account of priority or of the state of knowledge at the time. Researchers tracing the first report of a composition, a test result or a service practice should follow the Translated from note to the Russian issue and date their claim there, and should cite both forms where the distinction matters. Indexers, in turn, should link the two records rather than merging them, so that neither the Russian literature nor its English readership loses its own citation trail.

Evaluators encountering this journal in a publication list should therefore ask the right question. The question is not whether its decimals rival those of general materials journals, but whether the work it carries could have been found anywhere else in English. Very often it could not, and that uniqueness, sustained across more than nine thousand translated works in the OpenAlex record alone, is the measure that belongs at the centre of any fair assessment of Refractories and Industrial Ceramics.

Readers locating the journal for the first time should begin with Springer's journal page for current bibliographic and access information, and with the archive itself for everything else, because in a translation journal the archive, volume by volume and decade by decade, is the truest statement of scope, method and value that exists.