Announcing the Materials Advances Paper Prize

Here at Materials Advances we are lucky to receive high quality research papers from across the full range of materials science topics every year. We wanted to find a way to recognise the most significant papers published in the journal each year, judged by the expert materials science researchers who make up our Editorial and Advisory Boards. In this article we are excited to announce the winners and runners-up of the very first Paper Prize, as well as the process that we have taken to select these excellent articles.

2022 Materials Advances Paper Prize winners

Winning paper

Facet-dependent carrier dynamics of cuprous oxide regulating the photocatalytic hydrogen generation (https://doi.org/10.1039/D1MA00934F) by Cui Ying Toe, Marlene Lamers, Thomas Dittrich, Hassan A. Tahini, Sean C. Smith, Jason Scott, Rose Amal, Roel van de Krol, Fatwa F. Abdi* and Yun Hau Ng*

Runner-up papers

Metal-free polypeptide redox flow batteries (https://doi.org/10.1039/D2MA00498D) by Zhiming Liang, Tan P. Nguyen, N. Harsha Attanayake, Alexandra D. Easley, Jodie L. Lutkenhaus*, Karen L. Wooley* and Susan A. Odom

White light emission generated by two stacking patterns of a single organic molecular crystal (https://doi.org/10.1039/D2MA00670G) by Yuma Nakagawa*, Kuon Kinoshita, Megumi Kasuno, Ryo Nishimura, Masakazu Morimoto, Satoshi Yokojima*, Makoto Hatakeyama, Yuki Sakamoto, Shinichiro Nakamura and Kingo Uchida*

Recipients of the Paper Prize will receive:

• Certificates for all authors who contributed to the work

• A complimentary infographic

• Promotion through the various journal channels.

Selection process

We want this award to be transparent and inclusive, representing our materials science community. With that in mind, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any suggestions for how we can improve the process in future years (materialsadvances-rsc@rsc.org).

A shortlist of papers was selected by the Editorial Office using quantitative measures taking a snapshot of the performance of all the papers published in a 2022 issue. Citations, article downloads, and Altmetric scores (social media and news engagement) were considered. This data was gathered in March 2023, and the length of time since online publication was taken into account during our assessment to avoid the selection automatically favouring those papers that were published first. We also asked our Editorial and Advisory Board members to recommend papers to us that they recalled seeing, either as a reader or as a handling editor.

The shortlist of 15 papers were then sent to all 200+ members of our Editorial Board and Advisory Board for voting. This diverse group are all expert materials scientists and between them cover the wide-ranging scope of the journal. We felt that this maximised the subject area expertise of those who were voting and was the fairest method of selecting a single winning paper.

They were asked to judge the papers based on the following criteria:

• Quality of discovery/advance presented

• Potential future impact

• Originality of the work

• Significance to the field

Selecting a single paper to recognise for this annual award necessarily involved a degree of subjective assessment based on the above criteria. However, the broad experience and knowledge of our combined Editorial and Advisory Board members allowed a clear consensus to be reached. Board members were asked to indicate any potential conflicts of interest and these were taken into account.

Inclusion and diversity considerations

The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to supporting and improving inclusion and diversity in the chemical sciences, and this extends to our paper prizes. Our intention with the Paper Prize over time is to ensure that it is representative of the community as a whole. We recognise that we need to do more to foster inclusion and diversity in all areas of the publishing process. Along with over 30 other publishing organisations, we have made a joint commitment for action to set a new standard to ensure a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing. The resources we provide on our webpage are available for all to use to explain how we define equality, diversity and inclusion as well as implicit bias.

Future plans

We plan to award a Materials Advances Paper Prize on an annual basis going forward. To be in with a chance of winning please consider publishing your next materials science work in the journal.

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