The literature

The journals of nanoscience

Nanoscience was never given a single journal of its own and then filled it. It grew up inside physics, chemistry and materials science, and its papers still appear wherever the underlying discipline publishes. What follows is a reader's map of those titles, grouped by the kind of work they tend to carry.

The grouping matters more than any league table. A physicist looking for transport measurements on a nanowire, a chemist looking for a new synthesis of gold particles and a biologist looking for a peptide scaffold will each start in a different part of the list below, and each will find papers the other two would never see. The notes on each journal stick to what its publisher and reference sources say about its scope and history. There are no rankings here and no impact factors: those numbers change every year and say little about whether a given paper is sound.

Physics: letters and archival journals

The fastest route into print in physics has long been the letter: a short paper announcing a result, with the full account to follow elsewhere. Physical Review Letters is the model. The American Physical Society established it in 1958, when the editor of Physical Review, Samuel Goudsmit, turned that journal's letters section into a stand-alone title; it was the first journal designed for rapid publication of short articles, a format many other fields later copied. It now appears 52 times a year, aimed at a broad physics readership. Its short format suits the kind of nanoscale measurement that can be stated in a few figures: a new transport effect, a new optical signature, a new way of imaging a surface.

The longer, archival counterpart for solid-state work is Physical Review B, created in 1970 when the original Physical Review was divided into sections by subject. Its focus is condensed matter and materials physics, and the scope statement in its reference entry explicitly lists fullerenes, graphene, clusters and nanoscience among its subjects; the entry adds that it publishes over 5000 papers a year. The journal's own home page highlights a rotating selection of "Editors' Suggestions", which is a practical way to sample a very large journal without reading all of it.

Two American Institute of Physics titles carry much of the applied side. The Journal of Applied Physics began in 1931 under the name Physics and passed from the American Physical Society to the Institute in 1937; it concentrates on the physics of modern technology. Applied Physics Letters, a weekly, exists for the rapid publication of new work on applications of physics, which in practice includes many device papers built on nanostructured materials. For open-access physics there is also the New Journal of Physics, established in 1998 as an online-only title published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society.

Chemistry and physical chemistry

Chemists make most of the objects that physicists measure, and their journals carry the syntheses. The Journal of the American Chemical Society, founded in 1879 and published weekly, covers every branch of chemistry, so the synthesis behind a nanoscale material, or a new molecule designed to assemble, may appear there as readily as in a specialist title. Its German counterpart, Angewandte Chemie, is a weekly published by Wiley-VCH for the German Chemical Society and is known for review articles across chemistry as well as short research communications.

Physical chemistry sits closest to the nanoscale. The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, published weekly by the American Chemical Society from 1997, covered materials chemistry, soft matter, surfactants and biophysical chemistry. Nanoscale work grew so quickly that at the start of 2007 the journal was split, with a new Journal of Physical Chemistry C taking nanostructures, surfaces and interfaces. Anyone searching the early-2000s literature on nanoparticles needs to remember that it sits under the B title, not the C.

Langmuir, founded in 1985, is the American Chemical Society's journal for systems in which the interface dominates structure and function, which makes it the natural home for self-assembled monolayers, colloids and surface chemistry. Chemistry of Materials, published by the same society since 1989, carries synthesis and characterisation of new materials, including a great deal of nanoparticle and porous-materials chemistry.

Materials science

Advanced Materials is a weekly covering chemistry, physics, nanotechnology, ceramics, metallurgy and biomaterials. It began in 1988 as a supplement to Angewandte Chemie and remained part of it for its first eighteen months. Its mixture of communications, reviews and feature articles makes it a good place to see where materials research as a whole is moving, nanostructured materials included.

Journals devoted to the nanoscale

Titles dedicated to the field arrived in stages. The oldest is Nanotechnology, published by IOP Publishing since 1990 and covering research in all areas of the field. Then, in quick succession, the chemistry societies followed. Nano Letters was established by the American Chemical Society in January 2001 as a monthly covering all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology; its reference entry notes that it is indexed in PubMed, which is why some of its biologically flavoured papers turn up in biomedical searches.

The Nature group launched Nature Nanotechnology as a monthly in October 2006, and the American Chemical Society added ACS Nano in August 2007, with a scope running from synthesis and assembly through characterisation, theory and simulation of nanostructures. Open access came next: the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology was established in 2010. Its own description explains that it is completely funded by the Beilstein-Institut, a non-profit foundation in Frankfurt am Main, and charges neither authors nor readers, the model usually called diamond open access.

Not every new title aged well, and a reader should know that too. The Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology began in 2001, the same year as Nano Letters. Its reference entry records that its publisher was later identified as predatory on Beall's List, that the journal received an expression of concern and was dropped from the Science Citation Index Expanded in its 2019 edition, and that it was discontinued in 2021. Its papers are still findable, and some are no doubt sound, but its history is a reminder that a journal name containing the word "nano" guarantees nothing about review.

The general-science weeklies

Nature, a British weekly, and Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, first published in 1880, carry a small number of nanoscience papers each year, chosen for broad interest. Those papers are short and dense, with much of the evidence moved into supplementary files. Several of the landmark papers discussed elsewhere in this guide, including the 2004 report on atomically thin carbon films and the 2006 paper that introduced DNA origami, appeared in these two journals, so it pays to read their tables of contents even when a topic seems specialised.

Preprints and open routes

Finally, much physics and a growing share of materials work appears before formal publication on arXiv, the open repository launched in 1991. Its reference entry is careful to say that postings are moderated but not peer reviewed, and that in many areas of physics almost all papers are posted there before they appear in a journal. The preprint and the published paper can differ, sometimes a great deal, which is why the page on reading papers recommends checking which version you have. For a practical routine that combines journals, preprints and database searches, see keeping up with new papers.