Meeting the readers of AIP and APS journals

I spent yesterday afternoon at a reception called Meet the Editors of AIP and APS . The event is a regular feature of the March meeting of the American Physical Society, which is being held this year in Dallas, Texas.

The physicists who came to the reception enjoyed free drinks and hors d’oeuvres and had the chance to talk to the editors of Applied Physics Letters, Biomicrofluidics, Chaos, Physical Review Letters, Reviews of Modern Physics, and many of the other journals and magazines—nearly 40 in all—that the two societies publish. Making its March meeting debut was AIP’s newest journal, AIP Advances .

As Physics Today‘s online editor, I was especially keen to learn how physicists use the web. Listening to guests at the reception, I obtained a fairly consistent picture. Regardless of age or country of origin, the physicists I met use Google Scholar or Web of Science to find relevant papers. Once they find a paper, they may or may not read it online.

Although the search engine might be the first thing physicists turn to when they’re trawling scientific literature, where the search results abide still matters. A condensed-matter physicist from Colorado told me that she appreciates a well-designed journal webpage. “I like to move back and forward, to follow a paper’s references and its citations,” she said.

A condensed-matter physicist, from Germany, told me he uses RSS feeds to create personal tables of relevant papers. But to avoid missing relevant papers and to give himself the chance to stumble across interesting papers, he still visits the homepages of his favorite journals.

I didn’t find any evidence that younger physicists, whose generation is reputedly accustomed to surf across many and diverse sources of information without lingering, are any less likely to read papers in detail than their older colleagues. The internet makes it easier to find and skim papers, but when a paper is directly relevant to your work—or, in my case, when it’s the subject of a story—you still have to read it carefully.

I was a bit disappointed to find out that not many of the guests at the reception, young or old, visit Physics Today‘s website. They like the print issue. Maybe at next year’s March meeting I should hold my own reception.