News & Comment

An understanding of a material's microscopic architecture is important to improve its mechanical properties. Poisson's ratio, which celebrates its bicentenary this year, continues to provide a good metric for that.

Facing budget cuts, the UK's research councils are forced to make unpopular choices. Effective consultations should guide decisions.

The papers we published in 2008 and 2009 received on average 29.9 citations each in 2010. However, nearly 30% of them were cited more than 30 times, contributing to roughly two-thirds of the impact factor.

Following the Fukushima disaster nuclear energy has an uncertain future at best. But whether we can really afford to abandon nuclear power remains an open question.

As complex new materials such as nanoparticles increasingly make their way into commercial products, regulatory frameworks need to overcome a number of key challenges to remain fit for purpose.

Pavel Exner, the newly elected Vice President of the European Research Council and Scientific Director of the Doppler Institute for Mathematical Physics and Applied Mathematics in Prague, talked to Nature Materials about his role in the European funding institution, the value of peer review in identifying the best scientists, the rise of science metrics and the challenges of running an efficient evaluation system.

Citation analyses can condense scholarly output into numbers, but they do not live up to peer review in the evaluation of scientists. Online usage statistics and commenting could soon enable a more refined assessment of scientific impact.

As the United States Congress confronts budgeting challenges, whether federal funding of scientific research is perceived as an investment or a discretionary expense will have long-term consequences.