In other words, Physics is the cliff
"Physicists are drowning in a flood of research papers in their own fields and coping with an even larger deluge in other areas of physics. The Physical Review journals alone published over 18,000 papers last year. How can an active researcher stay informed about the most important developments in physics?
Physics highlights exceptional papers from the Physical Review journals. To accomplish this, Physics features expert commentaries written by active researchers who are asked to explain the results to physicists in other subfields. These commissioned articles are edited for clarity and readability across fields and are accompanied by explanatory illustrations."
notes version of the best new research being done across all of physics. It's like a 5 minute version of a colloquium, without the speaker playing with his or her microphone.And why do I bring this up now? Because the latest issue features a review of current issues in turbulent convection, a topic near and dear to my heart. And they used a great picture of convective cells on the solar surface (at right). Hooray for Physics!
Nick, I'm glad you pointed this out since I have always wanted to have some "cliff notes" version of the Physical Review Journals for the obvious reasons.
ReplyDeleteThanks for highlighting this. It is a great resource and more efficient than skimming something like arXiv (which I don't have the time to do in anything but my own sub-field).
ReplyDeleteAlexander,
ReplyDeleteI can also say that the people that write the articles and reviews are top notch. The turbulent convection article was written by Gunter Ahlers, who is one of the top people in turbulence research today and a fellow of both the APS and the AAAS. It's great to get simple, brief explanations from the people at the cutting edge - which is what Physics aims to due and generally accomplishes.