''Physical Review'' is a
peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by
Edward Nichols. It publishes
original research as well as
scientific
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
and
literature review
A literature review is an overview of the previously published works on a topic. The term can refer to a full scholarly paper or a section of a scholarly work such as a book, or an article. Either way, a literature review is supposed to provid ...
s on all aspects of
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
. It is published by the
American Physical Society (APS). The journal is in its third series, and is split in several sub-journals each covering a particular field of physics. It has a
sister journal In academic publishing, a sister journal, mirror journal or companion journal is a newer academic journal that is affiliated with an older, better-established journal in the same field.
Examples
*''JAAD Case Reports'' is a sister journal to the '' ...
, ''
Physical Review Letters
''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...
'', which publishes shorter articles of broader interest.
History
''Physical Review'' commenced publication in July 1893, organized by
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
professor
Edward Nichols and helped by the new president of Cornell,
J. Gould Schurman. The journal was managed and edited at Cornell in upstate
New York from 1893 to 1913 by Nichols,
Ernest Merritt
Ernest George Merritt (April 28, 1865 – June 5, 1948)Academi ''see also'' American Institute of PhysicBiography. was Dean of the Graduate School, Cornell University; Chair of the Physics Department.
Early life and career
Merritt was born ...
, and Frederick Bedell. The 33 volumes published during this time constitute ''Physical Review Series I''.
The
American Physical Society (APS), founded in 1899, took over its publication in 1913 and started ''Physical Review Series II''. The journal remained at Cornell under
editor-in-chief
An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies.
The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...
G. S. Fulcher from 1913 to 1926, before relocating to the location of editor
John Torrence Tate, Sr. at the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...
. In 1929, the APS started publishing ''
Reviews of Modern Physics
''Reviews of Modern Physics'' (abbreviated RMP) is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. It was established in 1929 and the current editor-in-chief is Michael Thoennessen. The journal publishes r ...
'', a venue for longer review articles.
During the
Great Depression, wealthy scientist
Alfred Loomis anonymously paid the journal's fees for authors who could not afford them.
After Tate's death in 1950, the journals were managed on an interim basis still in Minnesota by
E. L. Hill
E is the fifth letter of the Latin alphabet.
E or e may also refer to:
Commerce and transportation
* €, the symbol for the euro, the European Union's standard currency unit
* ℮, the estimated sign, an EU symbol indicating that the weigh ...
and
J. William Buchta until
Samuel Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.
Life and career
Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Nethe ...
and Simon Pasternack were appointed and the editorial office moved to
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...
on Eastern
Long Island,
New York. In July 1958, the sister journal ''
Physical Review Letters
''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...
'' was introduced to publish short articles of particularly broad interest, initially edited by
George L. Trigg, who remained as editor until 1988.
In 1970, ''Physical Review'' split into sub-journals ''Physical Review A'', ''B'', ''C'', and ''D''. A fifth member of the family, ''Physical Review E'', was introduced in 1993 to a large part to accommodate the huge amount of new research in
nonlinear dynamics
In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...
. Combined, these constitute ''Physical Review Series III''.
The editorial office moved in 1980 to its present location across the expressway from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Goudsmit retired in 1974 and Pasternack in the mid-1970s. Past Editors in Chief include
David Lazarus
David Lazarus is an American business and consumer columnist who works for '' KTLA'' and worked for the ''Los Angeles Times'' from August 2007 to January 2022. His last column was published on January 28, 2022.
Early life and education
He attend ...
(1980–1990;
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
),
Benjamin Bederson
Benjamin Bederson (born November 15, 1921) is an American physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project.
He graduated from City College of New York, Columbia University, and New York University. He worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...
(1990–1996;
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, th ...
),
Martin Blume (1996–2007; Brookhaven National Laboratory), and
Gene Sprouse (2007–2015;
SUNY Stony Brook). The current Editor in Chief is
Michael Thoennessen
Michael may refer to:
People
* Michael (given name), a given name
* Michael (surname), including a list of people with the surname Michael
Given name "Michael"
* Michael (archangel), ''first'' of God's archangels in the Jewish, Christian an ...
, whose term began in September 2017.
To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the journal, a memoir was published jointly by the APS and AIP.
In 1998, the first issue of ''
Physical Review Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams'' was published, and in 2005, ''Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research'' was launched. In January 2016 the names of both journals were changed to remove "Special Topics".
Renaming the APS Special Topics Series, American Physical Society, December 31, 2015 ''Physical Review'' also started an online magazine, ''
Physical Review Focus
''Physical Review Focus'' was an internet service of the American Physical Society that began in 1998, aiming to explain new developments in physics in a language understandable to the educated non-physicist. One or two short articles were publishe ...
'', in 1998 to explain and provide historical context for selected articles from ''Physical Review'' and ''Physical Review Letters''. This was merged into ''
Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
'' in 2011. The Special Topics journals are
open access; ''Physics Education Research'' requires page charges from the authors, but ''Accelerators and Beams'' does not. Though not fully open access, ''Physical Review Letters'' also requires an author page charge, although this is voluntary. The other journals require such a charge only if manuscripts are not prepared in one of the preferred formats. Since 2011, authors can pay an
article processing charge
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal ...
to make their papers open access.
APS Open Access announcement, American Physical Society, 15 February 2011 Such papers are published under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY). ''Physical Review Letters'' celebrated their 50th birthday in 2008. The APS has a
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
policy to permit the author to reuse parts of the published article in a derivative or new work, including on
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
.
The APS has an online publication entitled ''Physics'', aiming to help physicists and physics students to learn about new developments outside of their own subfield. This now includes the general-interest articles that appeared as ''Physical Review Focus''. A short-lived journal, also called ''Physics'', was published by
Pergamon Press
Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier.
History
The ...
and Physics Publishing Co. from 1964 through 1968, with the goal of printing "a selection of papers which are worth the attention of all physicists." The four volumes of this journal were eventually made freely available online by the APS under the alternative title ''
Physics Physique Физика
''Physics Physique Физика'', also known as various punctuations of ''Physics, Physique, Fizika'', and as ''Physics'' for short, was a scientific journal published from 1964 through 1968. Founded by Philip Warren Anderson and Bernd T. Matthi ...
'', reflecting how the title was originally printed on the journal covers and how it was sometimes referred to in the years since.
It also publishes ''Physical Review X'', an online-only
open access journal
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
. It is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes, as timely as possible, original research papers from all areas of pure, applied, and interdisciplinary physics. In 2014 ''Physical Review Applied'' began publishing research across all aspects of experimental and theoretical applications of physics, including their interactions with other sciences, engineering, and industry. In 2016 the APS launched ''
Physical Review Fluids
''Physical Review Fluids'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, published monthly by the American Physical Society. The journal focuses on fluid dynamics and also covers geophysical fluid dynamics, biofluid dynamics, nanofluidics and magnetohy ...
'' "to include additional areas of
fluid dynamics research", and in 2017 it launched ''Physical Review Materials'' "to fill a gap" in the coverage of materials research.
In 2019 ''Physical Review Research'' was launched to provide a broad fully open-access journal at about the same selectivity level as the older ''A'' - ''E'' journals.
In 2020, ''PRX Quantum'' was launched to provide a home for and connection between the numerous research communities that make up quantum information science and technology, spanning from pure science to engineering to computer science and beyond.
Journals
See also
*
List of fluid mechanics journals
This is a list of scientific journals related to the field of fluid mechanics.
{{columns-list, colwidth=30em,
*''AIAA Journal''
*''Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics''
*''Experiments in Fluids''
*'' Fluid Dynamics Research''
*''Flow, Turbulence and ...
Notes
References
External links
American Physical SocietyJournals of the APSAPS online publication ''Physics''Online archive of all back issues of ''Physical Review'' (subscription required)
;Index of freely available volumes
The term of copyright on volumes published before 1924 has expired. Most of these volumes are available online for free in their entirety:
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{American Physical Society
Physics journals
Publications established in 1893
English-language journals
American Physical Society academic journals
Academic journal series