The Editorial Board of the TOP Journal, Journal of Materials Science & Technology, has announced the outcome of the ESI TOP ARTICLE AWARD 2020 recently. An invited long review paper written by Professor Wu Chuansong's team at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shandong university, entitled "Friction stir welding and processing technologies-process, parameters, microstructures and applications: A review", which was published in first issue of 2018 on this journal, won the award.

Friction stir welding and processing (FSW/FSP) has been widely applied in the joining and processing of aluminum alloys and other low molting point alloys. To meet the requirements of joining, processing and manufacturing various kinds of materials and structures, researchers have developed many variants of FSW/FSP technologies. In order to report the latest research and development progress in related fields in time, the editorial board of Journal of Materials Science & Technology invited Professor Wu Chuansong to write a long review article to systematically introduce various processes and variants of friction stir based welding and processing technologies and their application feasibility in various materials, and have an outlook of the research status and research trend in this field. After publication in 2018, the above-mentioned review article has promoted the in-depth research in this field. Professor Wu Chuansong is the correspondent author of this article, and Girish Kumar Padhy, a foreign postdoctoral fellow under his guidance, is the first author while Shandong University is the only authors’ affiliation.

After the above paper was published, it has been praised and widely cited by international scholars in the relevant field, and has been marked as "Highly Cited Paper" on the Web of Science since July 2019. The editorial board of Journal of Materials Science & Technology made the selection of the ESI Top Article Award in 2020 based on the universally recognized ESI database.