Acta Crystallographica Section A: Foundations and Advances publishes articles reporting advances in the practice and theory of all areas of structural science in the broadest sense. As well as traditional crystallography, this includes nanocrystals, metacrystals, amorphous materials and quasicrystals. It also covers electron crystallography, diffuse scattering, pair distribution function studies, time-resolved XFEL studies, cryo-EM, tomography, small-angle scattering, coherent scattering, diffraction imaging, and the structure of strain and defects in materials. Contributions on advances in analysis tools that are foundational to crystallography, including descriptions and applications of methods, algorithms and software, and the use of emerging computational approaches such as artificial intelligence and machine learning as applied to structural science, are also welcome.

The journal has two parts, a rapid-publication Advances section and the traditional Foundations section. Articles for the Advances section are of particularly high value and impact. They receive expedited treatment and may be highlighted by an accompanying scientific commentary article and a press release.

The central themes of the journal are studies of the properties and arrangements of atoms, ions and molecules in condensed matter, and the experimental, computational and theoretical methods that form the basis for such studies. Priority is given to articles that clearly describe the significance of the work to as wide a structural science readership as possible.

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