Nature Materialsis ten years old, and we use this occasion to look back at how authors, reviewers and editors have contributed to the journal. We feature on the cover of this issue a 'word cloud' that shows the most recurrent words that appeared in the titles of published articles, and discuss in an editorial statistics on manuscript decisions and on the geographical share of manuscripts and reviewers. We also list a selection of what we consider landmark articles published in the journal over the past ten years.