context: A good dopant must endow the cathode material with superior cyclability. According to Fig. 1(a), among Cu, Ti, Mg and Zn, Mg and Zn are better dopants. From structural view, a good dopant should be able to segregate into precipitates during cycling, offering better material integration. However, when cycled at a lower upper cutoff voltage of 4.3 V, Mg dopant segregation cannot be activated. Therefore, Mg-doped P2-NMM10 shows comparable cyclability to Cu-doped P2-NMC10, which is shown in Fig. S10.† Intriguingly, when cycled at 4.3 V, the Zn-doped sample shows even better cycling stability (91% retention after 100 cycles). Fig. 5(a) shows the capacity retentions of the P2-NMZ10 electrodes at different upper cutoff voltages, from which we can see that Zn-doped P2-NMZ10 shows superior capacity retentions in all voltage windows. The corresponding TEM analysis on the cycled P2-NMZ10 samples shows that the Zn-dopant can form precipitates under all cycling conditions as shown in Fig. 5(b–i), which explains why P2-NMZ10 shows much higher cycling stability. Although increasing the upper cutoff voltage can accelerate the precipitate formation process, material degradation is also aggravated during high voltage cycling. Therefore, a good dopant should enable dopant precipitate formation easily, especially at low cycling voltage.