About Revista de plásticos modernos: Ciencia y tecnología de polímeros

Revista de plásticos modernos: Ciencia y tecnología de polímeros — Journal Profile

Revista de plásticos modernos: Ciencia y tecnología de polímeros, usually shortened to Revista de Plásticos Modernos or RPM, is a Spanish-language journal of polymer science and plastics technology published in Spain in association with the Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología de Polímeros (ICTP) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). Its record on Journals World carries ISSN 0034-8708, the identifier under which the title has been catalogued for decades. Few specialist periodicals in any country can match its continuity: the journal began in January 1950 as Revista de Plásticos, took the Modernos name from 1963, and was still appearing monthly more than seven decades later, reaching issue number 813 in July 2025 with a special number marking its seventy-fifth anniversary.

That longevity shapes everything about the title. RPM was not created as a narrow research journal in the modern citation-driven sense. Its founding editorial in 1950 presented polymers as entirely new substances with new applications, called to enrich the range of raw materials open to industry and technique, and the journal set itself up as a meeting place where science, technology and the plastics industry could speak to each other in Spanish. The ICTP describes it in exactly those terms today — a point of encounter between science, technology and the plastics sector — and calls it the first journal in Spanish in its field. A profile of RPM therefore has to cover two identities at once: a scholarly record of Spanish polymer research, and a professional and technical magazine for the people who make, process and use plastics.

This profile explains the journal's history, its publisher and institutional home, its subject scope across synthesis, processing and applications, how its issues are organised, who reads and writes for it, how its content can be found and cited, and what prospective authors and readers should understand before relying on it. Facts that could not be verified from official or reputable bibliographic sources are identified as not publicly disclosed or not verified, rather than filled in by guesswork.

At a glance

History and development

The journal's first number appeared in January 1950, at a moment when polymer science itself was still taking institutional shape in Spain. The ICTP's own institutional history places the launch alongside the first work on plastics standards and the early courses in plastics run from the CSIC, and Nobel laureate Hermann Staudinger — the chemist whose macromolecular hypothesis underlies modern polymer science — visited the CSIC plastics section in 1955, a visit the institute still uses to illustrate the support behind those first Spanish polymer researchers. RPM grew inside that environment: it was the publishing voice of a research community that was being built at the same time as the Spanish plastics industry it served.

In 1963 the title became Revista de Plásticos Modernos, the name it has kept since. The addition mattered. Spanish plastics production and processing expanded rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s, and the journal's pages followed the shift from describing a novel class of materials to reporting a mature industry: new resins and compounds, processing machinery and moulding practice, testing and standards, and applications in packaging, construction, agriculture, transport and consumer goods. Because it published in Spanish, RPM also performed a translation function of a practical kind — it made international developments in polymer chemistry and plastics engineering readable for Spanish-speaking engineers, technicians and managers who did not work in English-language research literature.

The journal survived the transitions that closed many institute magazines: the reorganisation of the CSIC, the arrival of commercial technical publishing, and the move online. The ICTP's 2013 annual report already notes RPM as edited and published by the institute and by then accessible online, alongside the institute's monthly information bulletin. In July 2025 the journal published issue 813, devoted to its seventy-fifth anniversary. That special number gave the floor to professionals from different application sectors, asking what impact the development of polymer materials had had on their fields and what they expected next, and it framed the anniversary explicitly as a tribute both to the visionaries who anticipated the versatility of these materials and to those building polymer knowledge today. Continuous monthly publication from 1950 to a numbered issue in the eight hundreds is, in itself, the strongest evidence of the journal's institutional backing and readership.

Readers consulting older material should be careful with the title change. Work published before 1963 is cited under Revista de Plásticos, work after it under Revista de Plásticos Modernos, and library catalogues may file the run under either form or under the full form with the subtitle Ciencia y tecnología de polímeros. The ISSN 0034-8708 and the RPM abbreviation are the most reliable anchors when tracing a citation across the change.

Publisher and institutional home

The journal is edited with the collaboration of the staff of the Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología de Polímeros, the CSIC institute in Madrid devoted to polymer research. The ICTP is organised in research departments covering areas such as polymer physics and elastomers, polymeric nanomaterials and biomaterials, physical chemistry of polymers, applied macromolecular chemistry, and chemistry and properties of polymeric materials — a structure that maps closely onto the journal's subject coverage, and which gives RPM direct access to active researchers as authors, referees and editorial contributors. Editorial-board service on the journal by ICTP researchers is documented in institute records, for example in staff curricula listing service on the journal's editorial council from 2015.

That institutional model has consequences for readers. RPM is not a commercial journal run to maximise article charges or impact metrics; it is an institute publication whose purpose is dissemination — in Spanish the ICTP calls this work divulgación — between research and industry. Its incentives are continuity, professional usefulness and coverage of the Spanish and Spanish-speaking polymer community. Its limits follow from the same model: it does not compete for the highest-impact international research papers, which Spanish polymer scientists usually place in English-language international journals, and its citation indicators are correspondingly modest. The Journals World record lists a low h-index for the title, which should be read as a reflection of language, audience and database coverage rather than as a verdict on the quality of its technical content.

The CSIC is Spain's national research council and its largest public research organisation, so the journal sits inside a wider system of Spanish scientific publishing that includes institute journals, monographs and dissemination magazines. For a reader outside Spain, the practical point is provenance: an article in RPM comes from, or has passed through, the country's principal polymer research institute, and the journal can be treated as an authoritative Spanish-language source on the state of polymer practice, even where an individual article is a review, a technical note or an industry report rather than an original research paper.

Scope and subject coverage

RPM covers polymer science and technology end to end. In synthesis and chemistry, it reports new monomers and polymers, polymerisation methods, copolymers and blends, composites and nanocomposites, elastomers and rubber technology, biomaterials and polymers for medical use, membranes, coatings and functional and smart polymers. In physics and characterisation, it covers crystallisation and morphology, thermal, mechanical and rheological properties, ageing and degradation, and the analytical methods used to measure them. The Journals World topic record for the title highlights exactly this spread, listing polymer science and applications, polymer crystallisation and properties, and injection moulding process and properties among its leading themes, together with work such as biodegradable polymer synthesis.

Processing and engineering form the journal's second great block. Injection moulding, extrusion, blow moulding, thermoforming, compounding, recycling processes and additive manufacturing with polymers all fall inside its remit, as do mould and tooling questions, process control, quality and standard testing. This is the coverage that distinguishes RPM from a pure chemistry journal: a paper may be valuable because it solves a processing problem, compares materials for a practical application, or explains a failure, without claiming a fundamental scientific advance.

The third block is applications and the industry itself. RPM reports polymer use in packaging, building and construction, agriculture and horticulture, the automotive and transport industries, electrical and electronic applications, health and consumer products. It has also carried material on the economics and organisation of the plastics sector, on regulation and the environment, and on sustainability questions — recycling, biodegradable and bio-based polymers, and the public debate about plastics — which have become steadily more prominent as the industry has had to answer environmental criticism. The seventy-fifth anniversary number, built around testimony from professionals in different application sectors, is a good sample of this breadth: the journal deliberately places a research article and an industry perspective inside the same conversation.

• Polymer synthesis, chemistry and modification
• Polymer physics, crystallisation, morphology and properties
• Elastomers, rubber, composites and nanocomposites
• Biomaterials and polymers for health applications
• Processing: injection moulding, extrusion and related technologies
• Recycling, biodegradable and bio-based polymers, sustainability
• Applications in packaging, construction, agriculture, transport and other sectors
• Testing, standards, industry developments and professional practice

Content, issues and editorial character

The ICTP describes the journal as a monthly publication produced without interruption since 1950, and the numbering reached issue 813 in July 2025, which is consistent with a long monthly run allowing for the title's early history. A typical issue mixes forms: research and review articles on polymer science, technical articles on materials and processes, reports on applications, and journalistic or professional material about the sector — news of companies, fairs, standards and training. The anniversary editorial practice is revealing: the journal marks its own history in its pages and treats the memory of Spanish polymer science as part of its subject matter, reprinting and reflecting on its 1950 founding definitions alongside present-day testimony.

Because the mix is deliberate, readers should identify the type of each item before citing it. A research article in RPM can be cited like any other journal article, with authors, title, year, issue and pages. An industry report or a dissemination piece should be cited for what it is — evidence of practice, opinion or the state of the sector at a date — not as peer-reviewed proof of a scientific claim. The journal's value to historians of technology and to market or sector researchers lies precisely in that mixture: run over decades, its pages document what Spanish plastics professionals were actually making, buying, regulating and worrying about, year by year.

Language is part of the editorial character. RPM publishes primarily in Spanish and has done so since 1950, which made it, in the ICTP's description, the first journal in the Spanish language in the field. Titles and summaries in catalogues appear in Spanish, and the full form of the title carries the Spanish subtitle Ciencia y tecnología de polímeros. International readers who work through translation should keep technical terms anchored to the Spanish original, particularly for grades, standards and process names that have no exact English equivalent.

Indexing, discoverability and metrics

RPM is catalogued in Spanish and international bibliographic systems under ISSN 0034-8708, and it is included in the Latindex system for Ibero-American scientific journals, which records the title, its publishing body and its ISSNs for journals meeting editorial quality criteria. Its articles are discoverable through library catalogues in Spain — university catalogues hold MARC records for the title — and through the ICTP and CSIC web presence, where the journal and its anniversary numbers are announced. The Journals World record summarises its topic profile and reports the works and citations indexed for the title in open bibliographic data.

Prospective authors should calibrate expectations about metrics. A Spanish-language institute journal serving a professional community will not accumulate citations at the rate of an English-language international research journal, and databases differ greatly in how much of its long run they index at all; the earlier decades in particular are unevenly covered. A low h-index or a small citation count in any single database is therefore a coverage statement first and a quality statement a distant second. The more meaningful indicators for this title are continuity, institutional provenance, and whether the specific article a reader needs is present and citable — all of which can be checked directly against the journal and library records rather than inferred from an aggregate score.

No Journal Impact Factor or quartile claim is made in this profile, because a current, officially verifiable value for this title could not be confirmed from the sources consulted. Authors who need a metric for an evaluation file should take it from the database their institution recognises, for the exact year in question, rather than from a journal-profile page.

Access, archives and how to read the journal

The journal is now accessible online as well as in its long print tradition; the ICTP noted online access more than a decade ago and announces current numbers, including the anniversary issue as a PDF, through its website. University and institute libraries in Spain hold long runs, and the CSIC's library network is the natural first route for a reader who needs a specific older article. When requesting an item, give the full citation — authors, article title in Spanish, year, issue number and pages — plus the journal's ISSN, because the pre-1963 title form can otherwise send a request to the wrong catalogue entry.

Access terms for individual articles vary by period and by the route through which the article is reached, and a single open-access licence for the whole run could not be verified from official sources. Readers should therefore check the terms shown on the article or issue they download, and should not assume that an article that is free to read is also free to republish. Subscription and single-issue arrangements for current numbers are handled through the journal's publisher channels; prices are not stated in this profile because a current official price list could not be verified at the time of writing.

Guidance for authors

Authors write for RPM in Spanish, for a readership that combines researchers with practising engineers and industry professionals. That has practical consequences for how a manuscript should be built. State the material, process or application problem clearly at the start; give grades, formulations, processing conditions and test methods in enough detail for a practitioner to reproduce or compare the work; report properties with their measurement standards; and draw the practical conclusion explicitly, because many readers will come to the article for the conclusion first. Purely theoretical work is within scope when its bearing on materials or processes is made plain.

Before submitting, check the journal's current author instructions through the ICTP and the journal's own channels, because submission route, file formats, and any charges are set by the publisher and can change; none of those operational details is asserted here, as a current official instructions page with those specifics could not be verified in the sources consulted. Confirm also that the work has not been published in substantially the same form elsewhere, prepare a Spanish title and summary that use the field's standard Spanish terminology, and be ready for editorial questions that test practical relevance as well as scientific correctness. Authors whose first language is not Spanish should have the manuscript read by a Spanish-speaking specialist before submission; in a journal whose mission is communication inside the Spanish-speaking community, language quality is part of editorial quality.

For citation after publication, cite the journal under its full title or the standard RPM abbreviation, with the year, issue and page numbers as printed, and include the ISSN when a bibliography or a database requires a journal identifier. If the article appeared before 1963, cite it under Revista de Plásticos, the title in force at the time.

Place in Spanish polymer publishing and verdict

RPM occupies a place that no newer journal can copy: it is the continuous Spanish-language record of polymer science and plastics technology from the material's post-war beginnings to the present sustainability debate. Spanish polymer research today publishes its frontier work internationally and in English — the ICTP's own departments publish in the leading international polymer journals — but the conversation that connects that research to Spanish industry, training and professional practice still runs substantially through this journal. Its training connection is historic as well: the institute's plastics school was created in 1959 and its high-specialisation course in plastics and rubber continues today as a university master's programme run with the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, and the journal and the course grew up serving the same community.

For a Journals World reader, the verdict is straightforward. Use Revista de Plásticos Modernos when you need Spanish-language authority: the Spanish terminology for a material or process, a technical account written for practitioners, the history of a Spanish polymer development, or evidence of the state of the Spanish plastics sector at a given date. Use it alongside, not instead of, the international research literature when you need the current scientific frontier. And respect its record: a monthly journal that began in January 1950 and was celebrating seventy-five uninterrupted years at issue 813 in July 2025 has earned the description its institute gives it — a meeting point between the science, the technology and the industry of plastics.

Sources consulted for this profile: ICTP-CSIC institutional pages and documents on the journal and its 75th anniversary (issue 813, July 2025); CSIC-related histories of polymer science in Spain; Latindex and Spanish university library catalogue records for ISSN 0034-8708; and the Journals World record for this post. Metric values and prices that could not be verified from an official source are not stated.