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Instructions to Authors

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Please carefully read all instructions before submitting a manuscript to JMR. Manuscripts not prepared according to JMR specifications may be returned to the author and may experience significant delays in review and time to publication.

Types of Manuscripts

JMR publishes new research that demonstrates a significant scientific impact or advance of scientific understanding of interest to the materials research community. Engineering studies and applications to commercial products are beyond the scope of JMR and should be submitted elsewhere. Manuscripts that report data without giving an analysis, interpretation, or discussion are only acceptable if the data are sufficiently important that publication is expected to lead to significant new studies or advancements in science or technology.

Manuscripts are accepted with the understanding that they represent original research, except for review articles, and that they have not been copyrighted, published, or submitted for publication elsewhere. Authors submitting manuscripts to JMR who have related material under consideration or in press elsewhere should send a copy of the related material to JMR at the time of submission. While their manuscripts are under consideration at JMR, authors must disclose any such related material. To expedite the review process, authors may provide names and contact information for up to four possible reviewers.

Articles: Journal of Materials Research publishes original research reports that include complete, detailed, self-contained descriptions of research efforts. All articles must contain an abstract (see Abstracts) and section headings.

Rapid Communications: Journal of Materials Research also publishes Rapid Communications, which are brief preliminary reports of unusual urgency, significance, and interest to the materials research and development community. These submissions may not exceed four published pages including the abstract. Since they are brief in length, section headings are not to be used. Acceptance of Rapid Communications is based on quality of technical content and total qualification for Rapid Communication articles includes acceptance of page charges.

Commentaries and Reviews: Journal of Materials Research occasionally publishes commentaries on topics of current interest or reviews of the literature in a given area. If an author proposes a review, the title, abstract, and a brief outline should be submitted to the USA Editorial Office, via e-mail, for prior consultation on the appropriateness of the topic.

Electronic Manuscript Submission

All manuscripts must be submitted via the JMR Manuscript Central site. Electronic submission expedites the review process and allows authors to track the status of their manuscripts at any time.

Manuscripts should be prepared using a word processing program, double-spaced, and saved in word processing format.
Figures should be uploaded in .tif or .eps format. The system has a 60 MB upload limit.
Detailed upload instructions are available on the submission web site.
After conversion, verify that no special characters or formatting are lost in the conversion, as the version of the PDF proof that is approved and submitted is the one that editors and reviewers will see.
Title, authors, author affiliations, and abstract must be included on page 1 of the uploaded manuscript.
During submission, authors must enter all coauthor names and unique e-mail addresses. Manuscripts will be unsubmitted if this information is not provided. Please have it available prior to beginning the submission process.
Authors must also enter manuscript keywords chosen from the MRS Publications Keyword List. These keywords are used for the Contents by Topic that appears in each issue of JMR. They are also used to facilitate searching on the MRS Web site.
JMR requires that authors provide names and contact information for at least two suggested reviewers for their manuscripts. During the submission process, the electronic submission system will prompt authors to enter this information, including email address.
When finished uploading and approving their papers, authors must click "Submit Manuscript" or the Editorial Office will not know that it is in the system.
Electronic manuscripts must be in English and formatted to fit 8 1/2 x 11 in. paper.
Authors who are not fluent in English must have their manuscript edited for correct English grammar and sentence structure before submission. See below for language editing services.
To check manuscript status, the corresponding author can log on to the JMR Manuscript Central site, choose the Author Center, and current status information will be listed for all of that author's articles.
To properly receive all e-mail notifications, please list jmr@mrs.org as an allowable sender in your email system.

Abstracts

An abstract must accompany each manuscript.

Abstracts for Articles should be 150 words or less.
Abstracts for Rapid Communications should be 100 words or less.
The abstract should be adequate as an index and as a summary, and should outline all subjects related to the new information being presented, as well as conclusions and all numerical results of general interest.
The abstract should avoid the use of jargon and other terminology that would render its content inaccessible to the nonspecialist.
Abstracts must be in past tense when referring to experiments but present tense when referring to scientific law.
The abstract is usually reprinted verbatim in abstract journals, and is reproduced electronically on the MRS website.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) provides Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) index categories, which yield machine searchable labels compatible with the physics literature.

Required Forms

Please be sure the manuscript number and corresponding author's name appear on all forms.
Production cannot begin until the JMR Editorial Office receives completed copies of these required forms.
To avoid delays, fax the completed forms to the Editorial Office at (724) 779-4396 upon submission of a manuscript.

Publication Charge Form: Publication charges, which are widely used and accepted throughout the scientific publishing community, are financial contributions from authors and authors' institutions to the cost of disseminating research results. They should be regarded as an essential and proper part of research budgets. Consequently, authors and their institutions are urged to pay a publication charge of $100 per printed page (with a one-page minimum). Papers for which publication charges have been accepted receive priority in publication order because they subsidize production of the journal. Please fax a completed publication charge form to the USA Editorial Office upon submission of your manuscript.

Copyright Form: Under U.S. copyright law, the transfer of copyright from the author(s) should be explicitly stated to enable a publisher to disseminate a work to the fullest extent. A Copyright Transfer form must be faxed upon submission of a manuscript.

Figures

Figures should be submitted electronically upon manuscript submission. There is a 60 MB file size limit in Manuscript Central. Please use LZW compression (which does not affect resolution) when saving .tif files. JMR Manuscript Central enables authors to link electronic figures to their text references.
Every illustration must be referred to in the main text in consecutive numerical order. A caption (legend) must be provided for each illustration. Captions must be placed on a separate page at the end of the manuscript. Color figures may be considered. However, in advance of publication, the author or the author's institution must agree to accept all additional costs incurred in publishing color photographs. Contact the Editorial Office for further information.
Line drawings and graphs must have a resolution of at least 1200 dpi and a minimum width of 3 inches. Photographs and micrographs must have resolution of at least 350 dpi and a minimum width of 3 inches. For all figures the maximum width is 6 inches. Lower-resolution images will not reproduce properly and will not be accepted. The Editorial Office will provide instructions for ftp of electronic figure submission on an as-needed basis.
JMR cannot be responsible for the loss of materials while they are in transit, so authors should not mail their only copies of figures.

Language Editing Services

Authors who are not fluent in English must have their manuscripts edited for correct English grammar and sentence structure prior to submission. The following list of English language editing services may be useful to JMR authors:

Please note that JMR and MRS are not affiliated with and have not used these companies and thus cannot endorse their services. In addition, use of these services does not guarantee that a manuscript submitted to JMR will be accepted.

Style

Authors are expected to follow the conventional writing, notation, and illustration style prescribed in Scientific Style and Format, The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Authors should also study the form and style of printed material in JMR. SI units should be used. Authors should use an identical format for their names in all publications to facilitate use of citations and author indexes.

Mathematics

Special care should be given to make equations and formulas clear to the typesetter. Variables should appear in italic text. Vectors should appear in bold text. Capital and lower-case letters should be distinguished clearly where there could be confusion. Fractional exponents should be used to avoid root signs. Extra symbols should be introduced to avoid complicated exponents or where it is necessary to repeat a complicated expression a number of times. The slash (/) should be used wherever possible for fractions. Mathematical derivations that are easily found elsewhere in the literature should not be used. Rather, the references should be cited.

References

All journal article references must include the title of the article and all authors. The phrases et al. and ibid. should not be used in any reference. Instead, all authors of the reference should be listed.

References should be double-spaced, numbered consecutively, placed on a separate page, and arranged thus:

A. Gouldstone, Y-L. Shen, S. Suresh, and C.V. Thompson: Evolution of stress in passivated and unpassivated metal interconnects. J. Mater. Res. 13, 1956 (1998).
H. Lamb: Hydrodynamics, 6th ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, England, 1940), pp. 573, 645.
T.R. Jervis, J-P. Hirvonen, M. Nastasi, and M.R. Cohen: Laser mixing of titanium on silicon carbide, in Beam-Solid Interactions: Physical Phenomena, edited by J.A. Knapp, P. Borgesen, and R.A. Zuhr (Mater. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. 157, Pittsburgh, PA, 1990), p. 395.

Tables

All but the simplest tabular material should be organized into separate tables. Tables should be numbered with Roman numerals on separate pages at the end of the manuscript. Captions should be sufficiently descriptive to make the data in the table intelligible without referring to the text. Complicated column headings in the body of the table should be avoided. If necessary, symbols that are explained in the caption should be used.

Permissions

JMR authors are required to obtain permission to reproduce any material for which they do not own copyright. It is the author's responsibility to obtain permission from the copyright owner and to provide written documentation of this permission to the JMR Editorial Office. For questions about permissions please contact the JMR Editorial Office.

Proofs of Articles accepted for publication will be sent to the author for review electronically and must be returned promptly as instructed. A few alterations in proof are unavoidable, but the cost of making extensive alterations or of correcting mistakes caused by careless preparation of the manuscript will be charged to the author. The proofing stage is not an opportunity to rewite a manuscript. Final manuscripts are submitted prior to the proofing stage, and excessive changes at this stage cannot be accommodated. If proofs are not returned, the manuscript will be published as it appears in the final accepted version, with necessary corrections in grammar and spelling in compliance with standard American English and accepted Journal style.