As you have noticed, 2015 has seen a lot of change for Materials & Design. First, there has been a change in the editorial team, now under the leadership of Prof. Alexander Korsunsky from Oxford University, as well as in editorial policies which are outlined in a recent Editorial Note. In addition, and over the past few months, a team at Elsevier has worked to solve a long standing technical problem.
I will have to start with a bit of history.
As most of you know already, journals are identified by their International Standard Serial Number, or ISSN. When Materials & Design was launched by Butterworth-Heinemann in 1978, it was under the name International Journal of Materials in Engineering Applications and published the first six issues with an initial ISSN 0141-5530. The journal titles then changed to Materials in Engineering and thus needed to be attributed a new ISSN: 0261-3069. Finally, in 1982, the journal title changed to what it is today: Materials & Design, with yet another ISSN: 0264-1275.
However, some of the internal records had not been updated, and the journal, despite its new name, was still published under its second ISSN, which conflicts with official sources such as Ulrich’s Periodical Directory.
Now this problem has been solved and articles in Materials & Design are being published under the appropriate ISSN. This has resulted in the creation of a new page on Sciencedirect.com where journals are identified with their ISSN.
In short:
On both page on Sciencedirect, hyperlinks have been added: ‘Continued as ‘Materials & Design’ and ‘Formerly known as ‘Materials & Design (1982-2015)’ respectively, in order to direct the readers to the relevant page were they to be looking for a specific article. All records in abstracting databases, such as Scopus, have also been updated. This, however, explains some discrepancies in the “Most Cited Articles” pod on the journal homepage which is due to display the most cited articles published since 2010, extracted from Scopus based on the journal’s ISSN, so articles published in older volumes will not be listed therein.
Finally, I want to sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused or cause to you in the future, but it was a long standing issue that needed to be addressed, and with the adequate records for each articles, this will facilitate their long-term discoverability and archiving.
Dr Baptiste Gault, Publisher of Materials & Design (@bat__go)