The New Journal of Physics (NJP) has long been a flagship journal for IOP Publishing. The journal published its first volume in 1998 and was an early pioneer of open-access publishing. Co-owned by the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG), after some 25 years the journal is now seeking to establish itself further as a journal that represents the entire range of physics disciplines.

NJP publishes articles in pure, applied, theoretical and experimental research, as well as interdisciplinary topics. Research areas include optics, condensed-matter physics, quantum science and statistical physics, and the journal publishes a range of article types such as papers, topical reviews, fast-track communications, perspectives and special issues.

While NJP has been seen as a leading journal for quantum information, optics and condensed-matter physics, the journal is currently undergoing a significant transformation to broaden its scope to attract a wider array of physics disciplines. This shift aims to enhance the journal’s relevance, foster a broader audience and maintain NJP’s position as a leading publication in the global scientific community.

While quantum physics in general, and quantum optics and quantum information in particular, will remain crucial areas for the journal, researchers in other fields such as gravitational-wave research, condensed- and soft-matter physics, polymer physics, theoretical chemistry, statistical and mathematical physics are being encouraged to submit their articles to the journal. “It’s a reminder to the community that NJP is a journal for all kinds of physics and not just a select few,” says quantum physicist Andreas Buchleitner from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg who is NJP’s editor-in-chief.

Historically, NJP has had a strong focus on theoretical physics, particularly in quantum information. Yet another significant aspect of NJP’s new strategy is the inclusion of more experimental research. Attracting high-quality experimental papers to balance its content and enhance its reputation as a comprehensive physics journal, will also allow it to compete with other leading physics journals. Part of this shift will also involve attracting a reliable and loyal group of authors who regularly publish their best work in NJP.

A broader scope

To aid this move, NJP has recently grown its editorial board to add expertise in subjects such as gravitational-wave physics. This diversity of capabilities is crucial to evaluate submissions from different areas of physics and maintain high standards of quality during the peer-review process. That point is particularly relevant for Buchleitner, who sees the expansion of the editorial board as helping to improve the journal’s handling of submissions to ensure that authors feel their work is being evaluated fairly and by knowledgeable and engaged individuals. “Increasing the editorial board was quite an important concept in terms of helping the journal expand,” adds Buchleitner. “What is important to me is that scientists who contact the journal feel that they are talking to people and not to artificial intelligence substitutes.”

While citation metrics such as impact factors are often debated in terms of their scientific value, they remain essential for a journal’s visibility and reputation. In the competitive landscape of scientific publishing, they can set a journal apart from its competitors. With that in mind, NJP, which has an impact factor of 2.8, is also focusing on improving its citation indices to compete with top-tier journals.

Yet that doesn’t only just include the impact factor but other metrics that ensure efficient and constructive handling of submissions that will encourage researchers to publish with the journal again. To set it apart from competitors, the time taken to first decision before peer review, for example, is only six days while the journal has a median of 50 days to first decision after peer review.

Society benefits

While NJP pioneered the open-access model of scientific publishing, that position is no longer unique given the huge increase in open-access journals over the past decade. Yet the publishing model continues to be an important aspect of the journal’s identity to ensure that the research it publishes is freely available to all. Another crucial factor to attract authors and set it apart from commercial entities is that NJP is published by learned societies – the IOP and DPG.

NJP has often been thought of as a “European journal”. Indeed, NJP’s role is significant in the context of the UK leaving the European Union, in that it serves as a bridge between the UK and mainland European research communities. “That’s one of the reasons why I like the journal,” says Buchleitner, who adds that with a wider scope NJP will not only publish the best research from around the world but also strengthen its identity as a leading European journal.

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The Electrochemical Society (ECS) is an international non-profit scholarly organization that promotes research, education and technological innovation in electrochemistry, solid-state science and related fields.

Founded in 1902, the ECS brings together scientists and engineers to share knowledge and advance electrochemical technologies.

As part of that mission, the society publishes several journals including the flagship Journal of the Electrochemical Society (JES), which is over 120 years old and covers a wide range of topics in electrochemical science and engineering.

Someone who has seen their involvement with the ECS and ECS journals increase over their career is chemist Trisha Andrew from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She directs the wearable electronics lab, a multi-disciplinary research team that produces garment-integrated technologies using reactive vapor deposition.

Her involvement with the ECS began when she was invited by the editor-in-chief of ECS Sensors Plus to act as a referee for the journal. Andrew found the depth and practical application of the papers she reviewed interesting and of high quality. This resulted in her submitting her own work to ECS journals and she later became an associate editor for both ECS Sensors Plus and JES.

Professional Opportunities

Physical chemist Weiran Zheng from the Guangdong Technion – Israel Institute of Technology China, meanwhile, says that due to the reputation of ECS journals, they have been his “go-to” place to publish since graduate school.

One of his papers entitled “Python for electrochemistry: a free an all-in-one toolset” (ECS Adv. 2 040502) has been downloaded over 8000 times and is currently the most-read ECS Advances article. This led to an invitation to deliver an ECS webinar — Introducing Python for Electrochemistry Research. “I never expected such an impact when the paper was accepted, and none of this would be possible without the platform offered by ECS journals,” adds Zheng.

Publishing in ECS journals has helped Zheng’s career advance through new connections and becoming more involved with ECS activities. This has not only boosted his research but also professional network and given these benefits, Zheng plans to continue to publish his latest findings in ECS journals.

Highly cited papers

Battery researcher Thierry Brousse from Nantes University in France, came to electrochemistry later on in his career having first carried out a PhD in high-temperature superconducting thin films at the University of Caen Normandy.

When he began working in the field he collaborated with the chemist Donald Schleich from Polytech Nantes, who was an ECS member. It was then that he began to read the JES finding it a prestigious platform for his research in supercapacitors and microdevices for energy storage. “Most of the inspiring scientific papers I was reading at that time were from JES,” notes Brousse. “Naturally, my first papers were then submitted to this journal.”

Brousse says that publishing in ECS journals has provided him with new collaborations as well as invitations to speak at major conferences. He emphasizes the importance of innovative work and the positive impact of publishing in ECS journals where some of his most cited work has been published.

Brousse, who is an associate editor for JES, adds that he particularly values how publishing with ECS journals fosters a quick integration into specific research communities. This, he says, has been instrumental in advancing his career.

Long-standing relationships

Robert Savinell’s relationship with the ECS and ECS journals began during his PhD research in electrochemistry, which he carried out at the University of Pittsburgh. Now at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, his research focusses on developing a flow battery for low-cost long duration energy storage primarily using iron and water. It is designed to improve the efficiency of the power grid and accelerate the addition of solar and wind power supplies.

Savinell also leads a Department of Energy funded Emerging Frontier Research Center on Breakthrough Electrolytes for Energy Storage. This Center focuses on fundamental research on nano to meso-scale structured electrolytes for energy storage.

ECS journals have been a cornerstone of his professional career, providing a platform for his research and fostering valuable professional connections. “Some of my research published in JES many years ago are still cited today,” says Savinell.

Savinell’s contributions to the ECS community have been recognized through various roles, including being elected a fellow of the ECS and he has previously served as chair of the ECS’s electrolytic and electrochemical engineering division. He was editor-in-chief of JES for the past decade and most recently was elected third vice president of the ECS.

Savinell says that the connections he has made through ECS have been significant, ranging from funding programme managers to personal friends. “My whole professional career has been focused around ECS,” he says, adding that he aims to continue to publish in ECS journals and hopes that his work will inspire solutions to some of society’s biggest problems.

Personal touch

For many researchers in the field, publishing in ECS journals has brought with it several benefits. That includes the high level of engagement and the personal touch within the ECS community and also the promotional support ECS provides for published work.

The ECS journals’ broad portfolio also ensure that researcher’s work reaches the right audience, and such a visibility and engagement is a significant factor when it comes to advancing the careers of scientists. “The difference between ECS journals is the amount of engagement, views and reception that you receive,” says Andrew. “That’s what I found to be the most unique”.

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More than 80 papers from North America have been recognized with a Top Cited Paper award for 2024 from IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World. The prize is given to corresponding authors who have papers published in both IOP Publishing and its partners’ journals from 2021 to 2023 that are in the top 1% of the most cited papers.

Among the awardees are astrophysicists Sarah Vigeland and Stephen Taylor who are co-authors of the winning article examining the gravitational-wave background using NANoGrav data. “This is an incredible validation of the hard work of the entire NANOGrav collaboration, who persisted over more than 15 years in the search for gravitational wave signals at wavelengths of lightyears,” says Vigeland and Taylor in a joint e-mail.

They add that the article has sparked and unexpected “interest and engagement” from the high-energy theory and cosmology communities and that the award is a “welcome surprise”.

While citations give broader visibility, the authors say that research is not impactful because of its citations alone, but rather it attracts citations because of its impact and importance.

“Nevertheless, a high citation count does signal to others that a paper is relevant and worth reading, which will attract broader audiences and new attention,” they explain, adding that factors that make a research paper highly citable is often because it is “an interesting problem” that intersects a variety of different disciplines. “Such work will attract a broad readership and make it more likely for researchers to cite a paper,” they say.

Aiming for impact

Another top-cited award winner from North America is bio-inspired engineer Carl White who is first author of the winning article about a tuna-inspired robot called Tunabot Flex. “In our paper, we designed and tested a research platform based on tuna to close the performance gap between robotic and biological systems,” says White. “Using this platform, termed Tunabot Flex, we demonstrated the role of body flexibility in high-performance swimming.”

White notes that the interdisciplinary nature of the work between engineers and biologists led to researchers from a variety of topics citing the work. “Our paper is just one example of the many studies benefitting from the rich cross-pollination of ideas to new contexts,” says White adding that the IOP Publishing award is a “great honour”.

White states that scientific knowledge grows in “irregular and interconnected” ways and tracing citations from one paper to another “provides transparency into the origins of ideas and their development”.

“My advice to researchers looking to maximize their work’s impact is to focus on a novel idea that addresses a significant need,” says White. “Innovative work fills gaps in existing literature, so you must identify a gap and then characterize its presence. Show how your work is groundbreaking by thoroughly placing it within the context of your field.”

• For the full list of top-cited papers from North America for 2024, see here. To read the award-winning research click here and here.
• For the full in-depth interviews with White, Vigeland and Taylor, see here.

The post Top-cited authors from North America share their tips for boosting research impact appeared first on Physics World.

More than 50 papers from India have been recognized with a top-cited paper award for 2024 from IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World. The prize is given to corresponding authors who have papers published in both IOP Publishing and its partners’ journals from 2021 to 2023 that are in the top 1% of the most cited papers.

The winners include astrophysicist Vaidehi Paliya from Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and colleagues. Their work involved studying the properties of the “central engines” of blazars, a type of active galactic nucleus.

“Knowing that the astronomy community has appreciated the published research is excellent,” says Vaidehi. “It has been postulated for a long time that the physics of relativistic jets is governed by the central supermassive black hole and accretion disk, also known as the central engine of an active galaxy. Our work is probably the first to quantify their physical properties, such as the black hole mass and the accretion disk luminosity, for a large sample of active galaxies hosting powerful relativistic jets called blazars.”

Vaidehi explains that getting many citations for the work, which was published in Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, indicates that the published results “have been helpful to other researchers” and that this broad visibility also increases the chance that other groups will come across the work. “[Citations] are important because they can therefore trigger innovative ideas and follow-up research critical to advancing scientific knowledge,” adds Vaidehi.

Vaidehi says that he often turns to highly cited research “to appreciate the genuine ideas put forward by scientists”, with two recent examples being what inspired him to work on the central engine problem.

Indeed, Vaidehi says that prizes such as IOP’s highly cited paper award are essential for researchers, especially students. “Highly cited work is crucial not only to win awards but also for the career growth of a researcher. Awards play a significant role in further motivating fellow researchers to achieve even higher goals and highlight the importance of innovation,” he says. “Such awards are definitely a highlight in getting a career promotion. The news of the award may also lead to opportunities. For instance, to be invited to join other researchers working in similar areas, which will provide an ideal platform for future collaboration and research exploration.”

Vaidehi adds that results that are meaningful to broader research areas will likely result in higher citations. “Bringing innovation to the work is the key to success,” he says. “Prestigious awards, high citation counts, and other forms of success and recognition will automatically follow. You will be remembered by the community only for your contribution to its advancement and growth, so be genuine.”

• For the full list of top-cited papers from India for 2024, see here.

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