Condensed Matter Seminar Series
Title: Physical Review and the battle of the bulge
Jessica Thomas
Assistant Editor, Physical Review Letters
Thursday February 19, 11 am, Room 298, Physics Building
The criteria for a paper published in Physical Review Letters are that it be ‘important’ and of ‘broad
interest’, in addition to being top quality research. But, scrolling down the
table of contents for the journal, which publishes roughly 80 papers per week,
one might reasonably ask: Are all
of these papers presenting ground-breaking research? Are they all majorly advancing the field? (One might even ask what some of the
titles or acronyms in the abstracts mean.)
These issues are not new to the journal, but have been a
concern since its inception 50 years ago.
In this talk, I will discuss continued efforts at Physical Review to maintain the prestige and aims of PRL, and its
other journals, as submissions grow, fields mature and become highly
specialized and the field of publishing becomes increasingly competitive. These efforts include a new
online-only, free publication called Physics
that is highlighting some of Physical
Review’s most important papers with expert and editor written
commentaries.
The format of the talk is intentionally open to encourage comments
and suggestions about the journal.
Bio: Jessica Thomas obtained a BSc at Yale University (1997) and a PhD at MIT
(2003). She completed her
post-doctoral work at Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a staff member of
the Department of Condensed Matter and Materials Science at BNL until
2006. She left research to join
the launch of Nature Nanotechnology,
a new publication from Nature Publishing Group. Since 2008, she has been an Assistant Editor at the American
Physical Society, working for Physical
Review Letters and Journal Innovations at the Physical Review.
Host: Gleb Finkelstein