It is again that time of the year, when I step back from my daily tasks and reflect on what happened with the journal in the previous 12 months. 2021 was quite a busy and special year, celebrating the 10th volume of Advanced Healthcare Materials, as already announced in my last year's editorial (2002146).

With this first issue in 2022, it is now really time to send a “Happy Birthday” to the journal, with its first official issue published exactly 10 years ago, on January 11, 2012. This milestone has been accompanied by another highlight, an impact factor increase to almost 10, i.e., a new number of 9.933 in the 2021 Journal Citation Reports (Web of Science Group, 2021).

While I thought last year that we could be able to gather for in-person celebrations in 2021, we celebrated almost exclusively virtually. Let me highlight one virtual event we hosted in November 2021, where we invited Molly Stevens (Imperial College London, UK), Yu Shrike Zhang (Harvard Medical School, USA) and Hélder Santos (University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands) to present their research related to “Translational Application of Biomaterials”.

To provide a collection of articles on “Advances in biomaterials research in the past decade”, we asked our Editorial Board members to write Review articles on their favorite area in biomaterials science. We are proud to present to you now a Virtual Issue with 27 Reviews to become the reference articles for the next decade. We hope you enjoy reading this special collection, which can be found here.

The pandemic has been extremely challenging for the research community in general, but probably the most affected are young researchers, postdocs, and young PIs deprived of many opportunities for having their voice heard. Thus, we teamed up with our sister journals Advanced Science, Advanced Materials, and Small to publish a Virtual Issue on Rising Stars, celebrating the diversity of the international scientific communities.

We are very happy to highlight already several Rising Stars in the biomaterials field in this collection. Don't forget to bookmark this page to stay up to date with the latest contributions, as we will continue to include further invited articles.

Again, last year Advanced Healthcare Materials published several special issues to recognize developing topics in the field. In February, we gathered a “Tribute to Professor George M. Whitesides” invited by the chairman of our Editorial Board, Younan Xia. In March 2021 Guest Editors Yanglong Hou, Wenbo Bu, Hua Ai, Zheng-Rong Lu, and Twan Lammers provided a selection of articles on “Stimuli-Responsive Nanotheranostics”. “Biomaterials Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology” was then featured in August 2021, again edited by Younan Xia. A special issue on “Wearable and Implantable Devices for Healthcare”, was published together with Wei Gao and Cunjiang Yu in September. Finally, we closed 2021 with a special issue on “Advances in Improving Healthcare with Aggregation-Induced Emission”, guest-edited by Dan Ding and Ben Zhong Tang.

Another notable development for the journal is the introduction of Accepted Article publication. These are articles accepted for publication that have undergone full peer review but have not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination, and proofreading process. With this new publication model the author-provided files are made available online immediately after acceptance of the article, therefore providing a faster route to getting your work published.

Last, but not least, I want to close this editorial with the tradition to thank all contributors to the journal, without whom we would be unable to publish Advanced Healthcare Materials:

This year I want to highlight the countless reviewers, who spend a lot of time assessing and improving, questioning and criticizing all articles we publish. This peer review is essential to the publication process and without this important quality control we could not maintain the journal's high scientific standards. We recognize with the increasing number of articles we receive and send out for review, and an increasing number of articles we accept for publication (more than 500 articles in 2021), we also ask an increasing number of reviewers to assess these papers. Thus, special thanks this year to our dear reviewers!

Of course, without our authors sending us their best work, with a lot of work spent on creating and presenting their data and crafted into the article format, we would be unable to publish anything. We hope the trend on increasing submissions continues in the coming year. Thanks also to our readers, who show us by increasing citations that the research we publish is relevant for further research and ultimately also for patients.

Your articles are handled by a dedicated and growing team of editors, thriving every day to send you a balanced and timely decision on your submission. First of all, I want to introduce you our new team of Deputy Editors appointed in 2021: Irem Bayindir-Buchhalter (who is now also Editor-in-Chief of Advanced NanoBiomed Research), Conor Doss, and Jing Zhu. They are accompanied by further peer review editors Emily Hu, Ulrike Kauscher Pinto, as well as the newest members of the team, Liqian Wang and Xi Wen.

Our guardians of all published content are our technical editors, led by Kieran O'Brien, together with Aaron Brown and Julia Abel-Ranzinger. The day-to-day contact for all authors, reviewers and editors is our administration team, most importantly Melanie Rettenmaier with assistance from Katie Lally. Finally, nothing would appear online without our dedicated production manager Christine Herth.

And with these words of thanks, I am wishing you a healthy and happy new year 2022!

Uta Göbel

Editor-in-Chief

Advanced Healthcare Materials