Article Guidelines

Reviews of Modern Physics aims to publish articles that review active areas of physics in a form that is useful to both practitioners and people entering the field.

Developing areas of physics certainly need reviews that are understandable to those outside the field, and accessibility is desirable in traditional areas as well. With this goal in mind, we ask that authors give considerable attention to the presentation of their material, making introductions accessible to intermediate graduate students and readers from other fields. The body of each paper should be economically and thoughtfully organized. Notation should follow the common physics conventions established in graduate-level textbooks, unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise.

For the practitioner, the review presents the current status of a given topic. It provides a historical background and a literature survey, of course, but an ideal review is more than a catalog of work done. It is a critical distillation of the progress on the topic, identifying the most successful methods and pointing out areas for future development.

RMP tries to cover all of physics with a volume size of 1500 pages per year, and this requires us to impose a length limit on the articles. This is 50 journal pages or roughly 150 double-spaced manuscript pages. Exceptionally, we will consider longer reviews that will have unique reference value in the literature. An example is the review of fundamental constants in the Jan 2005 issue.

While most of our articles will be traditional scholarly reviews in the sense described above, we also seek outstanding tutorial articles stemming from topical schools in areas of advanced physics. Finally, we would like to keep RMP's tradition of publishing articles that provide a broad new framework for understanding the phenomena in a given field, as did the papers of Feynman, Bethe, and Fermi. We will be highly selective of such articles, however.