Physical Review

• 1. Introduction

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  Physical Review is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that has stood at the center of physics publishing for well over a century. Edward Nichols, a professor at Cornell University, launched it in July 1893 with the help of Cornell's incoming president, J. Gould Schurman. What began as a single journal overseen from upstate New York is today a sprawling family of specialized publications covering everything from quantum information science to the dynamics of fluids. How did a journal born in a nineteenth-century university town become the institutional backbone of global physics research? And what does it mean that its story runs straight through some of the most turbulent decades in modern history?

• 2. Cornell Years

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  Nichols ran Physical Review alongside two colleagues, Ernest Merritt and Frederick Bedell, for two decades out of Cornell's campus. The 33 volumes produced during that period became known as Physical Review Series I. The American Physical Society, founded in 1899, eventually took over publication in 1913 and launched Series II. Even after the APS assumed control, the journal stayed at Cornell under editor-in-chief G. S. Fulcher until 1926, when it relocated to the University of Minnesota to follow the new editor, John Torrence Tate, Sr. That geographic loyalty to an individual editor says something about how personal the stewardship of scientific publishing was in that era.

• 3. Depression-Era Generosity

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  During the Great Depression, many physicists found themselves unable to afford the fees required to publish their research. A wealthy scientist named Alfred Loomis stepped in and, crucially, did so anonymously, quietly paying those fees on behalf of authors who could not cover them. The gesture kept the scientific record intact at a moment when economic collapse might otherwise have silenced entire lines of research. Loomis never publicized his intervention; the story is one of the quieter acts of patronage in the history of science.

• 4. Brookhaven and Growth

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  After Tate died in 1950, the editorial operations ran on an interim basis out of Minnesota under E. L. Hill and J. William Buchta. The journal found its footing again when Samuel Goudsmit and Simon Pasternack were appointed and moved the editorial office to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Eastern Long Island, New York. In July 1958, the sister journal Physical Review Letters was introduced specifically to handle short articles of particularly broad interest; George L. Trigg edited it from its founding and held that role until 1988. Goudsmit retired in 1974 and Pasternack in the mid-1970s, and in 1980 the editorial office settled into a new building across the expressway from Brookhaven, where it remains today.

• 5. Splitting Into Subspecialties

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  By 1970, the volume of physics research had grown large enough that a single journal could no longer absorb it cleanly. Physical Review divided into four sub-journals that year: A, B, C, and D, each covering a distinct corner of the discipline. A fifth, Physical Review E, arrived in 1993 largely to accommodate the surge of new work in nonlinear dynamics. Together, these five form Physical Review Series III. The expansion continued well into the twenty-first century. Physical Review Applied launched in 2014, Physical Review Fluids in 2016, Physical Review Materials in 2017, Physical Review Research in 2019, and PRX Quantum in 2020. The most recent addition, PRX Life, was launched in 2023 to serve researchers working at the boundary between the physical and life sciences.

• 6. Open Access and the Modern Era

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  In 1998, the first issue of Physical Review Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams appeared, followed by a physics education research companion in 2005. Both journals were renamed in January 2016 to drop the "Special Topics" label. Since 2011, authors can pay an article processing charge to make their papers open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Physical Review X, an online-only open access journal, anchors that commitment on the research side; by 2024 its impact factor reached 15.7, the highest in the family. Reviews of Modern Physics, which the APS launched back in 1929 for longer review articles, carries the highest impact factor in the entire portfolio at 44.8 as of 2024. The centennial of the journal was marked with a memoir published jointly by the APS and the American Institute of Physics, and Physical Review Letters celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. Robert Rosner became the current Editor in Chief in March 2025.