As Nature Reviews Materials turns 10, we look back on a decade of achievements and explore how the landscape of materials science has transformed.

In 2015, Web of Science indexed roughly 110,000 articles under the umbrella of materials science: the time was ripe for a journal that could distil this abundance of information into authoritative reviews. Nature Reviews Materials launched with the aim of being the first high-impact reviews journal in materials science, and the first Nature Reviews title in the physical sciences. A decade on, we have become a trusted reference for the global materials community. Overall, we have published 488 Reviews and Perspectives and 152 opinion pieces, cumulating a total of more than 200,000 citations.

In these 10 years, materials science has evolved and so has our coverage. This shift is pictured, comparing the dominant topics in our first volume in 2016 with those featured in 2025. Following the launch of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the field has become more grounded in urgent, real-world problems spanning clean energy, resource efficiency and climate resilience. As the world accelerates the green transition, advances in battery materials have become a central theme in our pages, and in 2025 we featured far more articles on solar technologies than in our early years. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the surge of interest in lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery brought nanomedicine to the forefront of our content.

Credit: Dave Johnston/Springer Nature Limited

Our focus has increasingly turned towards sustainability and materials circularity. Our Collection on plastics, published in early 2022, was influential: two of its articles were cited in reports by the OECD1 and by the World Health Organization2. And it was timely. Just a month afterwards, the United Nations Environment Assembly announced the Global Plastics Treaty. Building on this momentum, we recently launched a Series on materials circularity that brings together diverse expertise to frame materials innovations within regulatory, economic and social realities. Inclusivity has also become a more intentional part of our mission, as reflected in a Collection on this theme. We have broadened our author pool to include more early-career researchers and voices from different backgrounds and geographical regions: in 2025, we featured authors from 28 countries, versus 19 in 2016. Through these initiatives, the journal continues to evolve, mirroring the priorities and concerns of our readers.

As we reflect on how both the field and the journal have evolved, we invited 12 early-career researchers to highlight the most transformational breakthroughs of the past decade in their subfields, and how these advances shaped their careers. You will find these articles — spotlighting the topics highlighted in our cover image — throughout the year in our Anniversary Collection, alongside a curated selection of some of the most influential articles we have published over the past 10 years.

Ten years on, the number of articles published in materials science has almost doubled, surpassing 200,000 in 2025. In this rapidly expanding landscape, trusted, high-quality venues that offer curated and insightful overviews are more essential than ever, and we remain firmly committed to this mission. Let us close by thanking the past editors who helped to shape the journal and its values as well as our authors, peer reviewers and, most importantly, you, our readers. This journal exists for you, and we look forward to many more decades of bringing fresh topics and perspectives to both new and long-standing readers.