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Physics Journals · Encyclopedia

Physics journals constitute the principal scholarly-publishing infrastructure for physical-sciences research, with the Physical Review family (the American Physical Society publishing portfolio) as the canonical physics-publishing infrastructure plus the substantial high-impact general-physics venues. The Physical Review family includes Physical Review Letters (PRL, founded 1958, the principal short-format high-impact physics venue, IF ~9), Physical Review X (the open-access higher-tier-than-PRL premium venue founded 2011), Physical Review A through E (the sub-disciplinary specialised journals — A: atomic and molecular optics; B: condensed matter; C: nuclear physics; D: particles and fields; E: statistical and nonlinear physics), Reviews of Modern Physics (the principal physics review-journal, IF ~50), Physical Review Research (the broader open-access companion). Other major physics-publishing institutions: Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing with Journal of Physics A through G family, New Journal of Physics, IOP Reports on Progress in Physics; Elsevier with Nuclear Physics A and B, Physics Letters A and B, Annals of Physics; Wiley with Annalen der Physik (founded 1799, Einstein's 1905 papers were published here); Springer-Nature with European Physical Journal A through E family, Nature Physics (founded 2005, IF ~21), Nature Reviews Physics.\n\nThe arXiv preprint server (operating since 1991, founded by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory then at Cornell University) was originally a physics-only preprint server (the hep-th high-energy theory archive in 1991, the broader physics archives expanded through 1992-1995) and remains the principal preprint-publishing channel for physics with effectively-universal physics-community adoption. The arXiv physics archives include hep-ph (high-energy phenomenology), hep-th (high-energy theory), hep-lat (lattice QCD), hep-ex (experimental high-energy), nucl-th, nucl-ex, gr-qc (general relativity and quantum cosmology), astro-ph (with sub-archives), cond-mat (condensed matter, the largest physics archive), quant-ph (quantum physics), physics (general), and 5+ other physics sub-archives. Physics-journal review cycles are typically faster than other natural-sciences disciplines — Physical Review Letters reviews typically complete in 2-4 months.\n\nIndia's physics-publishing infrastructure includes Pramana — Journal of Physics (the Indian Academy of Sciences physics journal), Resonance (the general-science-and-physics-education journal), the substantial Indian physics-research output through the major institutions: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR Bombay — founded 1945 by Homi Bhabha, the principal Indian physics-research institution, with the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics NCRA Pune affiliated), IISc Department of Physics, IIT physics departments (especially IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur), the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER cluster), the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics Calcutta, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA Pune), the Raman Research Institute (RRI Bangalore), the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA Bangalore), the Indian Plasma Research (IPR Gandhinagar). India is among the founding member-states of the LIGO-India project for gravitational-wave detection. Indian-origin physicists have shaped 20th-and-21st-century physics — CV Raman (Nobel 1930 for the Raman Effect), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel 1983 for stellar structure and evolution), Satyendra Nath Bose (the foundational quantum-statistical-mechanics work with Einstein producing Bose-Einstein statistics), Meghnad Saha (the Saha ionisation equation), Homi Bhabha (cosmic-ray physics).\n\nFor a globally-mobile physicist, the arXiv-first publication culture makes physics-research-sharing structurally easier than in most other disciplines.\n\nCross-references: physics journals intersect with academy-natural-sciences, paper-root-physics, journal-root-archives, journal-root-math (the mathematical-physics overlap), journal-root-general, and the broader scientific-research economy.