About Microsystems & Nanoengineering

Microsystems & Nanoengineering

Microsystems & Nanoengineering is an online-only, open-access international journal devoted to original research and reviews on all aspects of micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems, from fundamental work to applied research. Based in Beijing, China, it is published by Springer Nature in partnership with a Chinese Academy of Sciences partner institute, and it sits on nature.com as part of the Nature Partner Journals programme. The journal was launched in 2015, and in the decade since it has become one of the clearest examples of a China-partnered English-language title building a genuinely international authorship and readership in a fast-moving engineering field: the design, making and use of devices and systems that work at the micro and nano scales.

Overview and identity

The journal's identity is defined by scale and by integration. Microsystems and nanoengineering concern devices whose working parts are measured in micrometres or nanometres, and in which mechanical, electrical, optical, fluidic and biological functions are combined on a single chip or in a single small system. Microsystems & Nanoengineering was created as a high-quality international forum for exactly that community. Its own journal information describes it as an online-only, open-access title publishing original research results and reviews on all aspects of Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems — MEMS and NEMS — from fundamental to applied research. It carries the electronic ISSN 2055-7434. Because it is online only, articles are published on nature.com as they are ready rather than being held for a printed issue, and because it is open access, published research is freely accessible to a global audience immediately on publication, with authors offered a choice of Creative Commons licences including Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).

Launch and publishing partnership

The journal was announced in June 2014, when Nature Publishing Group and the Institute of Electronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS) in Beijing announced its 2015 launch. It was the ninth journal Nature Publishing Group published in collaboration with partners in China, and the seventeenth in the Asia-Pacific region. The journal began accepting submissions towards the end of 2014, went live on nature.com in 2015, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences partner records its formal launch date as 28 May 2015. The Institute of Electronics, established in 1956, was described in the launch announcement as the first comprehensive institute in China in the fields of electronics and information science and technology, which gave the new title an institutional base in precisely the research tradition it was set up to publish. The journal's current journal-information page lists its publishing partnership in updated form, with Springer Nature and the partner supported by the State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology — a laboratory whose name, centred on transducers and sensing, signals the journal's close connection to sensor research. The Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIRCAS), the successor institutional home of the Beijing partner community, likewise describes the journal as published by the institute in cooperation with Springer Nature.

Aims and scope: MEMS and NEMS at the centre

The scope is deliberately organised around MEMS and NEMS. In the launch announcement, the journal set out to publish original research articles and reviews on the latest aspects of micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems, covering new design — theory, modelling and simulation — as well as fabrication, characterisation, reliability and applications of devices and systems at micro and nano scales. Research in nanoengineering related to MEMS and NEMS is explicitly included. That structure still describes the journal well. A paper in Microsystems & Nanoengineering typically does at least one of five things: it proposes a new device architecture or design method; it demonstrates a new way of fabricating a micro- or nanostructure; it characterises how such a device behaves; it tests how reliably it keeps behaving; or it shows what the device can do in a real application. The journal seeks work of high quality, high interest and far-reaching consequence, rather than incremental reports, and its editors have consistently framed it as a home for cutting-edge and emerging topics in the field.

Design, fabrication and characterisation

Three stages of the microsystems workflow recur throughout the journal's pages. The first is design: modelling and simulation of structures whose behaviour at small scales is governed by effects — surface forces, residual stress, squeeze-film damping, scale-dependent material properties — that cannot simply be scaled down from macroscopic engineering. The second is fabrication: the microfabrication and nanofabrication processes, many of them inherited from semiconductor manufacturing and then adapted, by which resonators, membranes, channels, electrodes and moving structures are actually made. The third is characterisation: the measurement of what a finished device does, electrically, mechanically, optically or fluidically, and the testing of its reliability over time and under stress. By publishing across all three stages in one venue, the journal serves readers who build complete systems rather than single components, and it reflects how microsystems research is actually done in laboratories in Beijing and elsewhere — as an integrated chain from a simulated design to a characterised, working device.

Microfluidics, sensors and lab-on-a-chip devices

Two application families named in the journal's founding description have remained especially visible. The first is sensors. The support of the State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology underlines the point: microsystems are, very often, sensing systems, converting pressure, acceleration, vibration, light, chemical concentration or biological signals into electrical readouts at very small size and low power. Work on resonators, capacitive sensing and nanosensors sits naturally within the journal's remit, as do wearable and implantable sensing platforms for healthcare and biomedical use. The second family is microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip devices, in which tiny volumes of liquid are moved, mixed, separated and analysed inside microfabricated channels. The journal has published, for example, work fusing MEMS technology with lab-on-a-chip platforms for nanolitre-scale DNA quantification and multiplex testing — a study built around silicon microcavity arrays for quantitative PCR that illustrates the journal's characteristic blend of microfabrication, fluid handling and a concrete biomedical measurement problem. Biomedical engineering more broadly, including drug delivery and biosensing, is one of the most consistently represented themes in its published research.

Applications beyond the laboratory

Although much of the journal's content is laboratory research, its stated remit runs from fundamental to applied work, and the applications it covers show why microsystems matter outside specialist institutes. Miniaturised sensors and actuators underpin consumer electronics, automotive safety systems, environmental monitoring, energy harvesting and medical diagnostics, and the journal's scope encompasses devices aimed at biomedicine, environmental monitoring and energy applications alongside its core engineering topics. Optoelectronics is another recurring strand, where micro- and nanofabricated structures meet light — for example in optical modulators and sensing devices. The common thread is not a single industry but a method: solving a measurement, actuation or fluid-handling problem by engineering it at the micro or nano scale, and reporting the result with enough design, fabrication and characterisation detail that other groups can build on it.

Editorial leadership

The journal is led by Editor-in-Chief Professor Yirong Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences partner institute in Beijing — a CAS academician who also served as director-general of the Aerospace Information Research Institute. He is supported by two Executive Editors-in-Chief: Professor Tianhong Cui of the University of Minnesota in the United States and Professor Ian White of the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. That three-person leadership, spanning Beijing, Minnesota and Bath, was in place from the launch and embodies the journal's founding intention: a China-partnered journal edited to international standards by working researchers in the field on three continents. In 2019 the partner institute reported an editorial board of 46 members from 15 countries and regions, committed to soliciting papers from internationally leading experts. The board structure matters for a journal in an interdisciplinary area, because a submission on a microfluidic diagnostic chip and a submission on a nanomechanical resonator need different specialist handling, and the journal's editors present that breadth as one of its founding design choices.

Open access and how articles are published

Microsystems & Nanoengineering is fully open access and online only. Published articles are hosted on nature.com, are freely accessible immediately on publication, and carry article-level metrics — downloads, citations and online attention — on each article page, so readers can see the attention an individual paper has received. The journal states that Springer Nature's publishing operation is intended to give the research high exposure through online hosting, press coverage and rapid publication. Its journal metrics page gives a median of seven days from submission to first editorial decision and a median of 111 days from submission to acceptance, figures that describe a selective journal that nonetheless moves manuscripts through peer review at a pace working engineering groups can plan around. For authors in China and internationally, the combination is the point of the Nature Partner Journals model: a Beijing-partnered specialist title with the production, hosting and discoverability infrastructure of a large international publisher behind it.

Indexing and journal metrics

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Scopus, PubMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), as recorded in the founding description, and its current indexing list on nature.com also includes Ei Compendex, INSPEC, the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Chemical Abstracts Service, the Chinese Science Citation Database, CNKI, Dimensions, Google Scholar and other discovery services. Indexing in PubMed Central is a telling detail for an engineering journal: it reflects the weight of biomedical microsystems, biosensors and lab-on-a-chip research in its pages. Its citation record has been strong from early on. The partner institute reported a first impact factor, for 2017, of 5.071, rising to 5.616 for 2018 and 7.127 for 2020. The journal's own current metrics page lists a Journal Impact Factor of 11.1 (2025), a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 10.7 (2025), a SCImago Journal Rank of 2.007 (2025) and 3,973,559 downloads in 2025 — figures that place a journal launched only in 2015 among the established high-visibility titles in instruments, nanoscience and microengineering publishing.

Place in Chinese and international microsystems research

For readers of a media directory, the significance of Microsystems & Nanoengineering is twofold. Inside China, it is one of the flagship English-language engineering journals to emerge from the Chinese Academy of Sciences system in Beijing, giving Chinese microsystems groups — among the world's most productive in MEMS, microfluidics and sensor research — a home journal edited from their own research community rather than only overseas venues. Internationally, it functions as a genuinely shared platform: edited across China, the United States and the United Kingdom, indexed across both Western and Chinese discovery systems, and read, on its publisher's own usage figures, millions of times a year. A researcher looking for current work on a resonator, a microfluidic chip, a wearable sensor or a nanoengineered device is likely to meet this journal early in a literature search, which is precisely the position its founders in Beijing and at Nature Publishing Group set out to build in 2014.