Behind the paper: Serendipitous encounters

Behind the paper: Serendipitous encounters

If you meet an editor of the Nature journals they will likely assure you that to get published you just need good science. But, the truth is there is some luck involved too – especially for interdisciplinary work. Sometimes the editors accidentally come across gems of papers. Bart Verberck and Liesbeth Venema tell two such stories.  Read more

More or more diverse?

The amount of scientific literature is growing at a staggering rate. In physics alone, more than 19,000 articles were published in 2016 and this is only what is indexed by Web of Science, excluding unpublished arXiv preprints, some conference papers, technical reports and PhD theses. There is little hope that anyone can keep up with what is going on outside their area of expertise and even that is a challenge. Review articles come in handy, but even reading just the physics review articles published in 2016 is hard — there’s more than 860 of them!  Read more

Confused: review, Review or review?

Confused: review, Review or review?

As a scientist you’re likely using the word ‘review’ every day. “I hope my article makes it through peer-review”, “We’re thinking of submitting to Physical Review A”, “I read a really good review of this field”, and so on. You probably gave little thought to this humble word, but interestingly it has slightly different meanings in all these examples. Why is a review article called as such, and why do we call the peers who referee our papers reviewers? And above all, why was the Physical Review called a Review in the first place, when it did not publish review articles, nor was it peer reviewed in the beginning?  Read more