Annalen der Physik

• 1. Introduction

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  Annalen der Physik has been publishing physics since 1799, making it one of the oldest scientific journals of its kind in the world. But a journal's age is just a number. What truly defined this publication was a single year: 1905, when a young Albert Einstein sent a stack of manuscripts to his editor and changed physics forever. How did a German-language periodical become the stage for the most consequential scientific papers of the twentieth century? And what happened to it when the world it belonged to began to crack apart?

• 2. Roots and Predecessors

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  Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren edited the journal's direct predecessors: Journal der Physik from 1790 to 1794, and then Neues Journal der Physik from 1795 to 1797. When those folded, Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert took over in 1799 under the new name Annalen der Physik. Gilbert ran the journal until 1824 and it became known informally as Gilberts Annalen. The habit of naming the publication after its editor stuck through several successions, giving readers Poggendorfs Annalen under Johann Christian Poggendorff, who served from 1824 to 1876, and Wiedemanns Annalen under Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann, who held the post from 1877 to 1899. Each change of editor also reset the volume numbering from 1, while a separate continuous count ran alongside. That parallel numbering became, as historians of the journal have noted, a perpetual source of confusion for anyone trying to cite old papers.

• 3. The Planck Connection

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  Paul Karl Ludwig Drude took over as editor in 1900, the same year Max Planck published his landmark paper on blackbody radiation in the journal. Planck had actually been associate editor since 1895, five years before Drude's tenure began. When Drude left in 1906, the editorial structure split for the first time: experimentalists Wilhelm Wien and Eduard Grüneisen handled the journal's empirical work, while Planck covered theory. Wien served from 1907 to 1928; Grüneisen from 1929 to 1949; Planck from 1907 to 1943. In those years, peer review was not yet standard practice. Einstein, for example, simply sent his manuscripts directly to Planck, who then published them. That direct line between author and editor helps explain how five papers of extraordinary ambition could appear in a single calendar year.

• 4. The Annus Mirabilis

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  In 1905, Einstein published what became known as the Annus Mirabilis papers: four papers covering photons and the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence, and the special theory of relativity. The journal had already hosted Einstein's first published work, a 1901 paper on capillarity. By 1907 he was back in its pages with a paper on the heat capacities of solids using quantized energy levels. In 1913, he co-authored a paper with Otto Stern on molecular motion near absolute zero. And in 1916, Einstein published his general theory of relativity in the same journal. No other single publication can claim to have printed that span of Einstein's work across those years.

• 5. Language, Politics, and War

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  German was the journal's original language and, for much of the nineteenth century, one of the dominant languages of scientific communication. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the journal ran in both German and English. Foreign authors contributed English-language articles first, but by the 1970s German-speaking authors were increasingly writing in English to reach wider audiences. The emigration wave that followed 1933 stripped German-language journals, including Annalen der Physik, of many of their strongest contributors. During this period the journal was characterized as representing the more conservative elements within the German physics community, alongside Physikalische Zeitschrift. Publication stopped entirely between 1944 and 1946 because of the war. Soviet military authorities granted permission to restart in August 1946, and from that point the journal maintained a formal co-editorship policy: one editor from East Germany and one from West Germany. That arrangement lasted until 1992.

• 6. Reunification and Reinvention

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  German reunification in 1990 ended the co-editorship arrangement, and English became the journal's sole language. Wiley-VCH subsequently acquired it. In 2008, the journal's ISO 4 abbreviation changed from Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) to Ann. Phys. (Berl.), marking the shift in its administrative identity. A further relaunch was announced for 2012, bringing a new editor and new editorial scope along with updated membership on the editorial board. As of 2024, the journal holds an impact factor of 2.5 according to the Journal Citation Reports, and its editor-in-chief is Stefan Hildebrandt. Among the papers the journal has published across its long history, Gustav Kirchhoff's 1847 work on electrical circuit equations and Heinrich Hertz's 1887 paper on the photoelectric effect stand alongside Einstein's canon as evidence of how consistently the journal sat at the center of foundational physics research.