About Rare Metals

Rare Metals

Rare Metals is an English-language, peer-reviewed journal published in Beijing as the official journal of the Nonferrous Metals Society of China. Published monthly in recent years, it is dedicated to original research articles, and occasional invited reviews, on the science, technology and applications of rare metals, and it describes its purpose as establishing a platform of communication between engineers and scientists working in the field. With print ISSN 1001-0521 and electronic ISSN 1867-7185, a publication history running from 1982, and indexing in the Science Citation Index Expanded, Ei Compendex and Scopus, it is one of China's longest-running English-language materials journals, reflecting the central place of rare metals and rare earths in the country's metals industry.

The journal's title names a specific family of materials rather than metals in general. Its coverage, as stated by its publisher, includes the metallurgy, processing and determination — the measurement and analysis — of rare metals, and it extends beyond extraction and refining into the use of rare metals in advanced materials such as superconductors, semiconductors, composites and ceramics. That combination, running from the metallurgy of scarce metals to the functional materials made from them, gives Rare Metals a scope that overlaps metallurgy, materials science, chemistry and condensed-matter physics at once.

Origins and publication history since 1982

Rare Metals has been published since 1982, making it a product of the first years of China's reform-era expansion of English-language scientific publishing, when Chinese societies and institutes began issuing English editions to make domestic research visible abroad. Bibliographic coverage records its run as 1982 to 1987 and from 1989 to the present, and its volume numbering preserves the continuity of that history: volume 28 appeared in 2009, volume 38 in 2019 and volume 44 in 2025.

Its frequency has grown with the field. Older descriptions of the journal record it as published bimonthly by the Nonferrous Metals Society of China, and its volumes as late as 2014 — volume 33 — contained six issues a year. From volume 34 in 2015 onward, the journal has appeared in twelve monthly issues a year, the pattern it has kept since, and its current publisher description states simply that it is peer-reviewed and published monthly. The move from six to twelve issues a year, without any change of title or sponsor, is itself evidence of the growth in rare-metals research submitted to and published by the journal during the 2010s.

The Nonferrous Metals Society of China

Rare Metals is the official journal of the Nonferrous Metals Society of China, the national professional society for the metals other than iron and steel, and directory listings give its Beijing address as 12B Fuxing Road, Beijing 100814. Society ownership shapes the journal's character: it is not a commercial publisher's creation but the English-language organ of the professional community whose members work in China's nonferrous and rare-metals industries and research institutes, and its stated mission of communication between engineers and scientists reflects that mixed industrial and academic constituency.

The society publishes a family of English titles, and Rare Metals should not be confused with its siblings. Transactions of Nonferrous Metals Society of China, founded in 1991 and edited at Central South University in Changsha, is the society's general nonferrous-metals journal, covering mineral processing, extraction metallurgy and materials across the whole nonferrous field. Rare Metals, by contrast, is the specialist title: older, Beijing-based, and confined to rare metals and the advanced materials derived from them. It is likewise distinct from Rare Metal Materials and Engineering, a separate journal associated with the Northwest Institute for Nonferrous Metal Research, despite the similarity of names.

Scope: metallurgy, processing and advanced materials

The journal's aims and scope, as published by Springer during its years as publisher, state that Rare Metals is dedicated to the publication and dissemination of original research articles and occasional invited reviews in the field of rare metals. Its coverage includes the metallurgy, processing and determination of rare metals, and it also publishes papers on the application of rare metals in advanced materials, such as superconductors, semiconductors, composites and ceramics. An earlier form of the same statement adds that it publishes contributions on the synthesis, processing, characterisation, properties and theoretical description of such advanced materials.

In practice, that scope reaches from the mine and the smelter to the device laboratory. Metallurgy and processing cover how rare metals are extracted, separated, refined and worked; determination covers the analytical chemistry by which their composition and purity are established — a critical matter for elements whose value depends on exact specification; and the advanced-materials coverage follows those metals into superconducting compounds, semiconductor materials, structural composites and technical ceramics. Directory analyses of its recent contents show the expected consequences of that breadth, with work on alloys, cathode materials, catalysts, rare-earth ions, nanoporous and nanostructured materials and electrochemical systems appearing alongside classical metallurgical studies.

Special issues and research themes

The journal regularly gathers themed collections, and the titles of its special issues map the directions in which rare-metals research has moved. Its January 2020 issue was a special issue on advanced permanent magnetic materials, publishing two reviews and eleven research articles drawn from REPM 2018, the 2018 conference on rare earth permanent magnets and advanced magnetic materials and their applications. Its editors explained that permanent magnetic materials are indispensable functional materials in computers, medical devices and home appliances, and that demand from green technologies such as electric transportation, wind turbines and precision motors had made high-quality magnets an urgent research topic; the issue covered rare-earth-based magnets, transition-metal-based magnets, ferrite magnets and micromagnetic simulation, with contributions from research groups in China, Korea and Russia.

Other themed issues listed in its archive include special issues on nanomaterials and rechargeable battery applications in 2017; on advanced thermoelectric materials and on solid-state energy storage devices in 2018; on photocatalysis and on biomedical metal implants in 2019; on advanced structural ceramics, on metal-based materials for energy catalysis and on advanced energy storage and conversion materials in 2020; and 2021 issues carrying topics on advanced energy storage and conversion, on metal-organic-framework-based materials for energy conversion and storage, on micro- and nanostructured electrode materials for electrocatalysis and batteries, and on advanced nanomaterials for gas and humidity sensors. The progression — from magnets and metallurgy toward batteries, catalysis, sensors and energy conversion — mirrors the shift of rare metals from industrial inputs to enabling materials for the energy transition.

Publishing history: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley

The journal's international distribution has passed through three major publishers. Issues up to volume 27 in 2008 were published in association with Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect archive for the title notes that it transferred to Springer Verlag as of 2009. Under Springer, from 2009 through volume 44 in 2025, the journal was published as a hybrid title, and Springer now lists it as archived and no longer receiving submissions with that publisher, while keeping all articles from its Springer years fully searchable.

The journal's 2026 articles appear instead on Wiley Online Library, published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Youke Publishing Co., Ltd — the company named as copyright holder on the journal's Springer pages as well — with new-style article numbers in volume 45. The sequence of publishers is a small history of Chinese journal internationalisation in itself: an Elsevier-era English edition, a long Springer period during which the journal went monthly and grew sharply, and a current Wiley period under a Chinese publishing company, with the society's ownership constant throughout.

Indexing and standing

Springer’s journal page lists Rare Metals as abstracted and indexed in a long roster of services. The principal international listings are the Science Citation Index Expanded, Ei Compendex and Scopus, together with the Astrophysics Data System, INSPEC, INIS Atomindex, EBSCO, ProQuest, Dimensions, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar and the OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service; Chinese and regional services include CNKI, the Chinese Science Citation Database, Wanfang and Baidu. Older descriptions of the journal summarise the same position more briefly, noting that it is indexed or abstracted by SCIE, EI, Chemical Abstracts and other services. Bibliographic databases record its Scopus coverage as running, with the early interruption noted above, from 1982 into the present.

Within the SCImago classification built on Scopus data, the journal sits in the subject categories of condensed matter physics, materials chemistry, metals and alloys, and physical and theoretical chemistry — a combination that captures its position between metallurgy and materials physics. Its standard ISO abbreviation is Rare Met. No single metric defines a specialist society journal, but continuous indexing in the field's principal databases across more than four decades, through three international publishers, is a concrete measure of the journal's durability.

Rare metals, rare earths and China's position

The journal exists because of the industrial weight of its subject. Rare metals are inputs to the permanent magnets, batteries, catalysts, semiconductors, composites and ceramics that fill the journal's pages, and China occupies a central position in rare-earth and rare-metal supply. A Beijing society journal in English devoted to these elements therefore serves two audiences at once: the large domestic community that extracts and studies them, and the international community that depends on the resulting materials and follows the research closely.

The content of the journal reflects that dual role. Its permanent-magnet special issue addressed materials used in electric vehicles and wind turbines; its energy-storage issues address the battery materials at the centre of the electric-vehicle industry; and its continuing coverage of metallurgy, processing and determination addresses the refining and analytical steps on which supply quality depends. Few national journals anywhere publish, in one title, both the extractive metallurgy of strategically important elements and the device-level materials science built on them.

Readership and authorship

Rare Metals addresses, in its own publisher's words, a platform of communication between engineers and scientists. That phrasing distinguishes it from purely academic titles: its natural readers include researchers in universities and Chinese Academy institutes, engineers in nonferrous and rare-metals enterprises, and materials scientists abroad working on magnets, batteries, catalysts and functional ceramics. Its authorship is correspondingly mixed, and its special issues draw on conference communities — the permanent-magnet issue, for example, selected its papers from an international conference's proceedings and included groups from China, Korea and Russia.

For libraries and researchers outside China, the journal offers something otherwise hard to obtain: a continuous, English-language, peer-reviewed record of Chinese rare-metals research from 1982 onward, held in the archives of successive international publishers and discoverable through the standard indexes. Work in this field published only in Chinese is extensive, and Rare Metals has long been one of the principal channels through which a part of it reaches international readers in full.

Rare Metals today

The journal continues as a monthly, peer-reviewed English title, the official journal of the Nonferrous Metals Society of China, now published through Wiley on behalf of Youke Publishing Co., Ltd, with its Springer-era archive from 2009 to 2025 remaining available and its earlier Elsevier-era volumes preserved on ScienceDirect. Its identity has not changed with its publishers: original research and invited reviews on the metallurgy, processing and analysis of rare metals, and on their use in superconductors, semiconductors, composites, ceramics and the energy and magnetic materials that dominate its recent special issues.

More than forty years after its first issues in 1982, Rare Metals remains what its longevity suggests — the specialist English journal of record for a field in which China is a central producer and researcher. Its archive traces the field's own transformation, from the extractive and analytical concerns of the 1980s, through the growth to monthly publication in the 2010s, to today's concentration on magnets, batteries and catalytic and energy materials, and it continues to carry that research from Beijing to the international materials community.