On 15 June 2016, Springer Nature launched Nano, the first non-journal-type product to be marketed by the company within the Nature Research portfolio. Nano is a database, but it is also a discovery tool. It is designed to provide researchers in academia and industry a simple way to retrieve information on nanomaterials and nanodevices. Over 200,000 profiles have been created, and each is based on information extracted mainly from research articles published in 30 journals. By searching the database, users are presented with at-a-glance information on different types of materials or devices related to the keyword used, including composition and properties, and including the source articles and patents from which the information has been extracted.

Realizing a comprehensive catalogue of nanomaterials and nanodevices is important, particularly now, as after a few decades of intense research to understand the fundamental properties of nanostructures, efforts have now shifted to incorporate such structures in commercial devices. But creating a comprehensive catalogue of nano-objects is no easy task. The main challenge is, and possibly will always be, deciding what goes in and what stays out. What size can be used as a threshold under which a material becomes a nanomaterial? The only useful answer is that a nanomaterial has qualitatively different physical and chemical properties from its bulk counterpart, and the size at which this happens varies with each material. To complicate matters, nanomaterials are studied by physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists, and information is scattered in a wide variety of publications.

A product such as Nano can help. By collecting information from research articles and patents, it follows the definition of nanomaterials and nanodevices used by the community. Furthermore, the information is not only gathered from specific nanoscience and nanotechnology journals, such as ours or Nano Letters, but also from journals such as Science, Angewandte Chemie International Edition and Advanced Materials, to list only a few.

Nano will grow to include more comprehensive information in the future. The plan for the rest of 2016 is to include information from a larger number of journals and to keep updating the database by including information from new publications. In the meantime, the product is ready to be used and we invite you to explore its functionalities, which can be done via institutional trials at http://nano.nature.com/.