Physical Review Letters
Physical Review Letters (PRL) is the world’s premier physics letter journal and the American Physical Society’s flagship publication. Since 1958 it has contributed to APS’s mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics by publishing seminal research by Nobel Prize–winning and other distinguished researchers in all fields of physics.
Across the Arc of Physics
PRL publishes short, high-quality reports of the most influential developments and transformative ideas in the full arc of fundamental, applied and interdisciplinary physics research. It is distinctive in the depth and breadth of its coverage of the broad subfields of physics. PRL welcomes manuscripts that report on pivotal advances that will influence the research of others. All published Letters meet at least one of its strict acceptance criteria.
By Scientists, For Scientists
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRL is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This commitment ensures that its mission and standards prioritize the needs of researchers and authors, not commercial publishing interests. The journal is international, with approximately three-quarters of published Letters originating from outside the U.S. Physical Review’s reach is far and wide, with authors and referees from over 130 countries.
PRL Scope
PRL covers the full range of applied, fundamental, and interdisciplinary physics research topics, encoded in our list of sections and subsections:
- Quantum information, science, and technology
- Cosmology, astrophysics, and gravitation
- Particles and fields
- Nuclear physics
- Atomic, molecular, and optical physics
- Physics of fluids, earth & planetary science, and climate
- Plasma and solar physics, accelerators and beams
- Condensed matter and materials
- Statistical physics; classical, nonlinear, and complex systems
- Polymers, chemical physics, soft matter, and biological physics
PRL Acceptance Criteria
Submitted manuscripts should substantially advance fundamental or applied physical science by meeting one or more of the following criteria:
- Open a new research area, or a new avenue within an established area.
- Solve, or make essential steps towards solving, a critical problem.
- Introduce techniques or methods with significant impact.
- Be of unusual intrinsic interest to PRL's broad audience.
Open Access
At the core of APS's mission is a commitment to meeting the needs of physicists, a community that has been at the leading edge of open access. As a result, APS supports a variety of sustainable access options:
- Authors can pay an article publication charge (APC) to make accepted manuscripts immediately accessible on publication under a CC-BY (4.0 International) license. In keeping with APS's community orientation, this is the most permissive license available at this time and permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. APCs cover publishing costs and decrease the need for subscription revenue, helping to keep subscription prices low (current APS APCs).
- APS authors are free to post the final published version of their articles on their laboratory and institutional web sites.
- APS makes its journals free to read at U.S. public libraries and high schools by application. Contact [email protected] for more information.
- APS is a founding member of CHORUS, which enables distributed public access to published research articles reporting on U.S. federal government funded research.
- SCOAP3: As of 2018, PRL is part of the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. All high-energy physics articles published in PRL since January 1, 2018, and that are posted on arXiv under one of the four "hep" primary designations, are made open access under a Creative Commons Attribution license under the auspices of SCOAP3.
- APCs for open access publication are waived for authors from countries for which APS offers free online access to its subscription journals.
Impact, Speed, and Visibility in PRL
PRL authors gain high visibility, rapid publication, and achieve broad dissemination of their work in the most cited journal in physics. PRL earns one citation every 80 seconds, for a total of 427,669 in 2016. The editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
- Editors’ Suggestions: Selected papers are chosen as Editors’ Suggestions to direct readers to interesting, important, and well-written Letters in areas of research beyond their usual interests. They can garner twice as many downloads and citations as the average letter and are more frequently covered by news outlets.
- Featured in Physics: Editors regularly notify Physics, APS's daily online news and commentary publication, about important Letters, resulting in coverage such as Viewpoint: Closing the Door on Einstein and Bohr’s Quantum Debate and Viewpoint: The First Sounds of Merging Black Holes.
- Collections: Editor-curated, thematic compilations of papers published in PRL and other Physical Review journals provide an historical overview of research in a given field and context for ongoing research.
- Publicity: APS promotes press-worthy papers from its journals to journalists through a weekly Tip Sheet, resulting in frequent coverage in industry publications and the popular press, such as the New York Times, BBC, and Nature.
- Social Media: Follow PRL on Twitter @PhysRevLett.
Editorial Board
The PRL editorial board is a diverse, global group of active, distinguished scientists, selected by editors in consultation with APS units appointed by the Executive Editor. They serve as divisional associate editors (DAEs) for three-year terms. DAEs may be requested by the editors to advise at any stage of the review process and they serve as adjudicators in formal appeals.
Editorial Team
PRL is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRL acceptance criteria.
Editorial and Publishing Policies
All Physical Review journals, including Reviews of Modern Physics, follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRL is published electronically one article at a time. The print version of the journal is published weekly. Articles are identified by volume number and a six digit article number, for example, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 254101 (2017).
PRL editors accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.