Abbreviated title (ISO 4) Phys. Rev. Language English | Discipline Physics | |
Edited by Pierre Meystre (Editor in Chief) Publisher American Physical Society (United States) Publication history 1893–1913 Series I
1913–1970 Series II
1970–Present Series III
1970–present Phys. Rev. A, B, C, D
1993–present Phys. Rev. E
1998–present Phys. Rev. AB
2005–present Phys. Rev. PER
2008–present Physics
2011–present PRX
2014–present Phys. Rev. Applied
2016–present Phys. Rev. Fluids | ||
Physical Review is an American peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. 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, Physical Review Letters, which publishes shorter articles of broader interest.
History
Physical Review commenced publication in July 1893, organized by Cornell University 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, 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 G. S. Fulcher from 1913 to 1926, before relocating to the location of editor John Torrence Tate, Sr. at the University of Minnesota. In 1929, the APS started publishing Reviews of Modern Physics, 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 and J. William Buchta until Samuel Goudsmit and Simon Pasternack were appointed and the editorial office moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Eastern Long Island, New York. In July 1958, the sister journal Physical Review Letters 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. 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 (1980—1990; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Benjamin Bederson (1990—1996; New York University), Martin Blume (1996—2007; Brookhaven National Laboratory), and Gene Sprouse (2007—2015; SUNY Stony Brook). The current Editor in Chief is Pierre Meystre, whose term began in August 2016.
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". Physical Review also started an online magazine, Physical Review Focus, in 1998 to explain, and provide historical context for, selected articles from Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. This was later merged into Physics. The Special Topics journals are open access; Physics Education Research requires page charges from the authors, but Physical Review Special Topics: 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. Authors can pay extra charges to make their papers open access. 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 policy to permit the author to reuse parts of the published article in a derivative or new work, including on Wikipedia.
The APS has a publication entitled Physics, aiming to help physicists and physics students to learn about new developments outside of their own subfield. This now includes the longer general-interest articles that appeared as Focus. It also publishes Physical Review X (PRX), an online-only gold open access journal. 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, the newest APS journal 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 2015, the APS announced the creation of a new journal Physical Review Fluids to better serve the Fluids community.