Physical Review Journals Research Articles

Scientometric Assessment of Indian Scientists’ Contribution to Selected Physical Review Journals during 2004-2018

The present study reveals Indian authorship trend and their contribution in five selected highly cited journals of American Physical Society (APS) as reflected in the Web of Science (WoS) database. During 2004-2018, India placed 11th rank having 4.6% contribution and Indian scientists published total 9,823 research articles including 50.98% international collaboration. The Physical Review D (PRD) journal published majority of Indian authored articles which also get larger citations impact and developed European countries like USA, Germany and France were the leading collaborating countries. Maximum articles received citations in the range of ≥1 - <10 and only 194 articles attracted at least 100 or more citations. It is also found that the Indian scientists involved in high energy physics produced significant research articles under international collaborative experimental groups like ALICE, ATLAS, STAR etc to share cost, infrastructure and capabilities. The study will be helpful for policy makers and scientists in identifying Indian researchers’ publication pattern in the selected APS journals of repute.

Co-author Weighting in Bibliometric Methodology and Subfields of a Scientific Discipline

Abstract Purpose To give a theoretical framework to measure the relative impact of bibliometric methodology on the subfields of a scientific discipline, and how that impact depends on the method of evaluation used to credit individual scientists with citations and publications. The authors include a study of the discipline of physics to illustrate the method. Indicators are introduced to measure the proportion of a credit space awarded to a subfield or a set of authors. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical methodology introduces the notion of credit spaces for a discipline. These quantify the total citation or publication credit accumulated by the scientists in the discipline. One can then examine how the credit is divided among the subfields. The design of the physics study uses the American Physical Society print journals to assign subdiscipline classifications to articles and gather citation, publication, and author information. Credit spaces for the collection of Physical Review Journal articles are computed as a proxy for physics. Findings There is a substantial difference in the value or impact of a specific subfield depending on the credit system employed to credit individual authors. Research limitations Subfield classification information is difficult to obtain. In the illustrative physics study, subfields are treated in groups designated by the Physical Review journals. While this collection of articles represents a broad part of the physics literature, it is not all the literature nor a random sample. Practical implications The method of crediting individual scientists has consequences beyond the individual and affects the perceived impact of whole subfields and institutions. Originality/value The article reveals the consequences of bibliometric methodology on subfields of a disciple by introducing a systematic theoretical framework for measuring the consequences.

The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers.

Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinarity. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a unilateral trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary.

Editorial: Materials Research in the Physical Review Journals

Editorial: Materials Research in the <i>Physical Review</i> Journals

Editorial: Materials Research in the Physical Review Journals

Editorial: Materials Research in the <i>Physical Review</i> Journals

Editorial: Materials Research in the Physical Review Journals.

Editorial: Materials Research in the Physical Review Journals.

Editorial: Materials Research in the Physical Review Journals

Editorial: Materials Research in the <i>Physical Review</i> Journals

Cooperation and coauthorship in scientific publishing.

Research collaboration occurs more frequently today than in the past. As a consequence, cooperation and competition are crucial determinants of academic success. In multiauthored publications, not all authors contribute evenly. Hence, some authors end up with less time or resources to work on parallel projects, decreasing their number of publications. Although detailed information on the contribution of each author in multiauthored publications is generally not available, the order of authors often discloses information on differential contributions. Here we analyze the full data set of Physical Review journals to show that, along with the increasingly number of multiauthored publications, first authors incur costs and last authors are bestowed benefits in terms of number of publications. In other words, authors publishing more often as first authors have fewer publications in the short-term than authors publishing more often as last authors. Using a simplified network representation where direct links represent the costly action of first authors towards last authors, we analyze the evolution of cooperation in multiauthored publications.

Generalized friendship paradox in complex networks: The case of scientific collaboration

The friendship paradox states that your friends have on average more friends than you have. Does the paradox “hold” for other individual characteristics like income or happiness? To address this question, we generalize the friendship paradox for arbitrary node characteristics in complex networks. By analyzing two coauthorship networks of Physical Review journals and Google Scholar profiles, we find that the generalized friendship paradox (GFP) holds at the individual and network levels for various characteristics, including the number of coauthors, the number of citations, and the number of publications. The origin of the GFP is shown to be rooted in positive correlations between degree and characteristics. As a fruitful application of the GFP, we suggest effective and efficient sampling methods for identifying high characteristic nodes in large-scale networks. Our study on the GFP can shed lights on understanding the interplay between network structure and node characteristics in complex networks.

Do scientists trace hot topics?

Do scientists follow hot topics in their scientific investigations? In this paper, by performing analysis to papers published in the American Physical Society (APS) Physical Review journals, it is found that papers are more likely to be attracted by hot fields, where the hotness of a field is measured by the number of papers belonging to the field. This indicates that scientists generally do follow hot topics. However, there are qualitative differences among scientists from various countries, among research works regarding different number of authors, different number of affiliations and different number of references. These observations could be valuable for policy makers when deciding research funding and also for individual researchers when searching for scientific projects.

Time-varying priority queuing models for human dynamics

Queuing models provide insight into the temporal inhomogeneity of human dynamics, characterized by the broad distribution of waiting times of individuals performing tasks. We theoretically study the queuing model of an agent trying to execute a task of interest, the priority of which may vary with time due to the agent's "state of mind." However, its execution is disrupted by other tasks of random priorities. By considering the priority of the task of interest either decreasing or increasing algebraically in time, we analytically obtain and numerically confirm the bimodal and unimodal waiting time distributions with power-law decaying tails, respectively. These results are also compared to the updating time distribution of papers in arXiv.org and the processing time distribution of papers in Physical Review journals. Our analysis helps to understand human task execution in a more realistic scenario.

Rescaling citations of publications in physics

We analyze the citation distributions of all papers published in Physical Review journals between 1985 and 2009. The average number of citations received by papers published in a given year and in a given field is computed. Large variations are found, showing that it is not fair to compare citation numbers across fields and years. However, when a rescaling procedure by the average is used, it is possible to compare impartially articles across years and fields. We make the rescaling factors available for use by the readers. We also show that rescaling citation numbers by the number of publication authors has strong effects and should therefore be taken into account when assessing the bibliometric performance of researchers.

Pounds for Papers

The American Physical Society (APS), a leading publisher of physics journals, will next month make full-text articles free for all to read online when they're published—for a one-time fee that anyone can pay. Many commercial and nonprofit journals already offer a pay-for-open-access option; some rely entirely on author fees so they can be free to all readers. APS said last week that it will begin by charging a per-article fee of $975 for its Physical Review journals and $1300 for the elite Physical Review Letters. APS Editor-in-Chief Martin Blume calls the move a step toward “possibly being fully open access someday.” At least one institution wants to pay; CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, aims to raise funds to make all particle physics papers freely accessible.

The journal as an overlay on preprint databases

ABSTRACTThe Physical Review journals, particularly Physical Review D (PRD) on particle and gravitational physics, have been near the centre of a revolution in electronic publishing caused by the Los Alamos eprint archive, which began posting papers in theoretical particle physics nearly eight years ago. This paper describes how the journals, particularly PRD, have responded and thrived with this revolution in scientific communication, and how we expect things to continue to develop in the future.

Is Nature Fractal?

David Avnir et al. (Science's Compass, 2 Jan., p. 39) report on the high proportion of hasty claims of fractality in Physical Review journals and end by saying that “[t]his is the fractal geometry of nature.” When assessing a field, other authors might not dwell so much on the statistics of implied and possible failures, but on the variety and quality of the best work. In the case of fractal geometry, it is outstanding.

Scaling range and cutoffs in empirical fractals

Fractal structures appear in a vast range of physical systems. A literature survey including all experimental papers on fractals which appeared in the six Physical Review journals (A-E and Letters) during the 1990's shows that experimental reports of fractal behavior are typically based on a scaling range $\Delta$ which spans only 0.5 - 2 decades. This range is limited by upper and lower cutoffs either because further data is not accessible or due to crossover bends. Focusing on spatial fractals, a classification is proposed into (a) aggregation; (b) porous media; (c) surfaces and fronts; (d) fracture and (e) critical phenomena. Most of these systems, [except for class (e)] involve processes far from thermal equilibrium. The fact that for self similar fractals [in contrast to the self affine fractals of class (c)] there are hardly any exceptions to the finding of $\Delta \le 2$ decades, raises the possibility that the cutoffs are due to intrinsic properties of the measured systems rather than the specific experimental conditions and apparatus. To examine the origin of the limited range we focus on a class of aggregation systems. In these systems a molecular beam is deposited on a surface, giving rise to nucleation and growth of diffusion-limited-aggregation-like clusters. Scaling arguments are used to show that the required duration of the deposition experiment increases exponentially with $\Delta$. Furthermore, using realistic parameters for surfaces such as Al(111) it is shown that these considerations limit the range of fractal behavior to less than two decades in agreement with the experimental findings. It is conjectured that related kinetic mechanisms that limit the scaling range are common in other nonequilibrium processes which generate spatial fractals.

Generation of Optical Harmonics

This article appears in the following collections:The Physical Review Journals Celebrate The International Year of LightThe editors of the Physical Review journals revisit papers that represent important breakthroughs in the field of optics.Letters from the Past - A PRL Retrospective2008 marked PRL’s 50th anniversary. As part of the celebrations a collection of milestone Letters was started. The collection contains Letters that have made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research.