About Journal of Magnesium and Alloys

Journal of Magnesium and Alloys

The Journal of Magnesium and Alloys (JMA) is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted entirely to magnesium science and engineering. Launched in March 2013 as a quarterly, it is published by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi, sponsored by the National Engineering Research Center for Magnesium Alloys (CCMg) at Chongqing University together with the Chinese Committee for Magnesium and its Application, and edited from Chongqing (ISSN 2213-9567). Chongqing University describes it as the first international academic journal specialised in magnesium and its alloys — a single-metal journal created because magnesium, the lightest structural metal in common engineering use, had acquired a worldwide research community large enough to sustain one.

Founding in Chongqing

JMA was founded in 2013 by the National Engineering Research Center for Magnesium Alloys of Chongqing University in collaboration with the Chinese Committee for Magnesium and its Application. The founding was an institutional statement as much as a publishing one: the CCMg, directed by Professor Fusheng Pan, is the centre of China's national magnesium research effort, and Chongqing had become the hub of that effort, home to major magnesium alloy research groups and industry. A dedicated international journal, edited from the centre itself, was intended to give the field a flagship venue of its own rather than leaving magnesium papers scattered through general metallurgy titles. The journal records that about half of the papers in its first year came from outside China, and that some forty-five papers appeared in 2013 — evidence that the international community the founders hoped to convene did in fact use the title from the start.

Editors and editorial board

The founding editor-in-chief is Academician Pan Fusheng of Chongqing University, director of the CCMg, with Professor Peng Xiaodong serving as managing associate editor. Professor Changxu Shi — Shi Changxu, one of China's most honoured materials scientists — wrote the foreword for the journal and serves as honorary editor-in-chief. The editorial board, according to Chongqing University, is made up of well-known magnesium experts from more than ten countries, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan and Russia, and has included figures such as the chairman of the International Magnesium Association, the chairman of the Korea Materials Society and members of national engineering academies. That board structure underlines the journal's founding ambition: a Chinese-sponsored title that would be governed, and read, as an international one.

Why a journal for one metal

Magnesium alloys are repeatedly described in the journal's own materials as among the most promising lightweight materials of the twenty-first century. Magnesium is substantially lighter than aluminium and far lighter than steel, so alloys based on it are attractive wherever mass matters — in vehicles, aerospace structures, portable electronics and, because magnesium is biocompatible and resorbable, in temporary medical implants. The same metal is difficult: it corrodes readily, is hard to form at room temperature and has a hexagonal crystal structure that complicates deformation. Those difficulties are precisely why a specialised literature exists. Alloy design, corrosion protection, extrusion and deformation behaviour, and microstructure control in magnesium form a coherent research programme, and JMA was created as the programme's dedicated international medium, in Chongqing University's phrase, "for the publication of theoretical and experimental studies in magnesium science and engineering."

Scope and subject coverage

Elsevier's aims-and-scope statement says the journal covers all aspects of magnesium and alloys and their manufacture. The listed coverage runs from raw materials through alloy casting; extrusion and deformation; corrosion and surface treatment; joining and machining; simulation and modelling; microstructure evolution and mechanical properties; new alloy development; and magnesium-based composites. It extends to biomaterials and energy materials — magnesium in resorbable implants and in battery and hydrogen-storage research — and to applications and recycling. Appropriate submissions, the publisher states, include studies of the scientific and engineering factors affecting the metallurgy, processing, microstructure, properties and applications of magnesium and its alloys, and also reports documenting the thinking, philosophy and strategies of magnesium science and engineering, a formulation that leaves room for perspective and review writing about the direction of the field itself.

Article types and publishing model

The journal considers contributions in a range of categories listed by its publisher: full-length articles, reviews, editorials, perspectives, news, letters, comments, case reports and technical notes. It is published by Elsevier with publishing services on behalf of KeAi Communications — KeAi being the Beijing-based company formed to publish Chinese research internationally — and the copyright line records the National Engineering Research Center for Magnesium Alloys of China, Chongqing University, as the owning institution. JMA is open access, so its articles are freely available to readers, a model that suits a journal whose purpose is to convene and grow an international field rather than to sit behind subscription barriers. Special collections mark the field's milestones, among them the collection issued for the journal's tenth anniversary under the theme "Magnesium and Its Alloys for Better Future."

Indexing and recognition

Chongqing University records that JMA was officially included in the Science Citation Index in December 2018, describing it as the first engineering journal of Chongqing to be included in SCI. Its first impact factor, for 2018 in the Journal Citation Reports released in June 2019, was 4.523, ranking it fifth among the seventy-six SCI-indexed journals in the Metallurgy and Metallurgical Engineering category and placing it in the first quartile; Chongqing University's report the following year recorded the 2019 impact factor as 7.115, ranking second among seventy-nine journals in the category. In 2018 the journal also received support from Phase II of China's International Influence Promotion Project for scientific and technological journals, its CiteScore in Scopus reached 4.77, and in 2019 it was selected among China's leading journals — described by the university as one of twenty-two leading journals nationally and the only one in materials and metallurgy. Ranking services classify it in the first quartile for both mechanics of materials and metals and alloys.

Magnesium research and the Chongqing hub

The journal cannot be separated from the research ecosystem that created it. The National Engineering Research Center for Magnesium Alloys at Chongqing University is the sponsoring institution, and its director edits the journal; the Chinese Committee for Magnesium and its Application, the national community body, is co-sponsor. That arrangement gives JMA a direct line to the conferences, standards work and industry programmes of the Chinese magnesium community, and it gives that community a journal whose pages it collectively owns. At the same time the founding account stresses international participation from the first year, and the journal's anniversary and impact-factor reports are written for a global audience. The result is a title that functions simultaneously as a national flagship and as the field's international meeting place.

Place in magnesium publishing

Before 2013, magnesium research appeared in general metallurgy and materials journals, conference proceedings — notably those of the international magnesium conferences — and the publications of bodies such as the International Magnesium Association. JMA changed that landscape by offering the first international journal specialised in magnesium and magnesium alloys, as both the university and KeAi describe it, with a permanent editorial home, an open-access model and, from 2018, SCI indexing. Its subsequent rise to the top of the metallurgy category rankings in the Journal Citation Reports made it, within a decade of launch, one of the most visible journals in its parent discipline as well as in its niche. For a single-metal field, that is a remarkable publishing trajectory.

Readership and authors

JMA's readers and authors are the magnesium community itself: alloy developers and physical metallurgists, corrosion scientists, forming and casting engineers, researchers working on magnesium biomaterials and energy applications, and the automotive and aerospace engineers who assess magnesium components. Because the journal is open access and published in English through Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform, that community can follow it from any country — appropriate for a metal whose research is concentrated in China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada and the United States. From its Chongqing base, the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys has become the record of how a once-specialist metal grew into one of the most active lightweight-materials fields in the world.