Editorial: phys. stat. sol. (a) 205/1

Abstract

AbstractHow do you find the scientific information and the manuscript reference you need? The answer to this basic but very important question for every active scientist has changed significantly over the last 30 years. When I was a Ph.D. student or a young postdoc, I would venture regularly to a strange and quiet place called a “library”, where all important journals in my field could be easily identified already from the amount of the shelve space they filled. To find a specific reference and to preserve it for future use was limited by the physical exercise to carry a stack of heavy volumes to the copy machine and to press a “copy” button for each page I really wanted to keep. On the way, sometimes I actually found another interesting paper just by browsing through the latest issue of Journal X, and I copied this one, too. And in most cases, I even read what I copied.Today, things are much better! All relevant information is available online in electronic form, so I do not have to leave my office anymore to find out what's new. The impact factors of journals and the h‐factors of authors help me to distinguish good from bad, or at least that is the hope. Whenever I search for a specific topic, anyhow I will get more hits than I can digest in a realistic time. Fortunately, printers by now are so fast and powerful that I can transfer the rest to a printout which I will, most likely, never use again in the foreseeable future.But seriously, although the way to make use of and to deal with scientific information has changed drastically in the last couple of decades, the basic needs of active scientists for reliable, up‐to‐date, and easily accessible information exchange with their international colleagues worldwide has basically remained the same. We at physica status solidi, therefore, for more than 45 years have been and are dedicated to provide exactly that service to our authors and readers, whether they make use of the pss hardcopies in the library or whether they browse the online files of physica status solidi. Last year, more than 2500 articles have been published after strict peer review and careful editing, which makes physica status solidi (nomen est omen) the second largest journal series in solid state physics. The journal has more than doubled in volume since the year 2000, but the Impact Factor also has increased by a factor of two since 1995, showing that we did not trade in quantity for quality. And, last but not least, the visibility of the journal series as measured by the number of full text downloads has increased by a similar factor of two in the last 24 months alone.In October 2007, more than 40000 full text downloads of physica status solidi articles have been registered by the Wiley Interscience data base. Unfortunately, we have no idea how many of these articles have actually been read …In the name of the entire pss‐team, I thank all of you for your continued support of and interest in physica status solidi and wish you a successful year 2008!