It has become an Advanced Science tradition to include in our editorials a list of articles with the most citations collected in the two‐year window after their publication (Table 1), and it is with joy and excitement that we congratulate and thank all authors who made it into this year's top ten.

In the past, the papers that have made it into this list have included mostly energy‐related topics like batteries and water splitting, which comes as no surprise considering our close bond with the Advanced Materials family and the strong energy research community that publishes across many of those journals. Although we happily continue to see articles dedicated to battery research among the most cited articles, we also find few new, rising subject areas such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, and biomaterials.

These new appearances flag an undeniable development in the research landscape published by Advanced Science since its launch in late 2014: a steady increase in articles from the Health Sciences and Medicine and Life Sciences categories (Figure 1). Articles of special interest to this portion of our audience are highlighted in the continuous Health, Medical and Life Sciences Virtual Issue, initiated in 2017 and currently boasting 66 articles (50 research articles and 16 reviews), summing 1483 citations to date. This reflects the increasing relevance of Advanced Science as a forum for researchers from the life and health sciences to read, review, and publish.

Advanced Science is committed to representing multi‐ and interdisciplinary research, and this is more evident than ever when looking at the word cloud in Figure 2. Keywords you probably would not have found here three or four years ago now stand out quite prominently, like cancer, immunotherapy, inflammation, in‐vivo, stem cells, and many more.

Papers in Advanced Science not only receive good citations, but are also gaining attention via social‐ and news media, reaching far beyond the scientific community, as we can see when looking at the articles published in 2020 with the highest Altmetrics scores (Figure 3). Here again, we see a growing influence of the more bio‐related content. Topics like plant engineering, biomedicine, and organs‐on‐a‐chip are another indication of our growing scope. We are convinced that these contributions have a high chance to become next year's most cited papers.

Not only is the scientific content worth the spotlight, but also the creativity and artistic sense of many of our authors, and we struggled to choose merely a few of 2020's Cover Pictures to display in Figure 4. Many of these artworks accomplish the very difficult task of summarizing concepts on length scales impossible to distinguish with the human eye, in disciplines ranging from battery research and genomics to 3D printing technologies, among many others.

Speaking of visibility and creativitiy, we could not leave out one of the highlights of 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of a method for genome editing: the CRISPR/Cas9 system. This method revolutionized many fields beyond basic research in the life sciences, including medicine, materials science, and biotechnology. To honour this achievement, a collection of related publications was prepared by ChemBioChem, Angewandte Chemie, Small, Small Methods, Advanced Therapeutics, Advanced Materials, Advanced Biosystems (now Advanced Biology) and Advanced Science. Two of the several CRISPR‐related articles published by Advanced Science, those focused on using deep learning to predict off‐target activities in CRISPR systems and on applying CRISPR/Cas9 system to drug resistance in breast cancer, were featured in this virtual issue.

Turning our eyes from what is behind us to the year now at our doors, we aim to continue establishing Advanced Science as required reading for its many represented disciplines, which involves optimizing the experience for authors, reviewers, readers, and editors. Working towards this, we have updated the categories available to define a manuscript upon submission (Figure 5). The previously available Physical Sciences & Engineering, being the strongest category in Advanced Science, has gained thirteen subcategories to better cover the many competitive subject areas it embraces, such as Energy Storage, Energy Generation and Conversion, Condensed Matter Physics, and Electronic Devices. The Health Sciences and Medicine and Life Sciences categories were replaced with the combined category Biological & Health Sciences, encompassing seventeen subcategories, while Environmental Science and Social Sciences & Humanities stand as their own categories.. All categories and subcategories are further supplemented with relevant keywords. We will keep working on strengthening underrepresented fields and we remain committed to quality and to you.

In line with improving the author, reviewer, and reader experience, in Advanced Science and in its sister journals, many additional initiatives have been carried out. Both Communication and Full Paper formats have been replaced by a more general Research Article, which can contain original research of any length, simplifying the submission and transfer processes for authors. Data availability statements and recommended data repositories have also been made available in an effort towards open science, and our Author Guidelines have been updated. With these changes, Wiley aims to provide a better and more uniform service to researchers when preparing, submitting, reviewing, and reading manuscripts.

With that we would like to thank everyone for their support, especially our board members (please see our recently updated Executive and International Advisory Boards here) and our reviewers, but of course also our authors and readers! Please let us know if you have any feedback, ideas, or suggestions. We are always open to discussion.

Have a healthy and happy year 2021 and we hope to see many of you in person again this year.

On behalf of the whole team,

Kirsten, Ana and Irem