Announcement: Electronic-First Publication and Article Numbers (October 1, 2000)

In recent years, the physics community has become increasingly accustomed to accessing the current literature electronically. The Editors of Physical Review E have decided to introduce a change in this journal's production process, beginning with the January 2001 issue (Volume 63, Number 1). Under the new system (already introduced in 1998 by Physical Review D, in 1999 by Physical Review C, in January 2000 by Physical Review A, and being considered by some European journal publishers), all articles are first posted electronically, with the printed and online versions of the complete issue appearing at a subsequent date; both versions will continue to be visually identical.

In making this change, we will move from a batch mode that focused on the production of an entire printed issue to one that allows each article to be published electronically, one at a time, soon after the page proofs are returned by the authors and prepared for electronic publication. Each article will be posted electronically in its final form, including the final bibliographic citation. New articles will be added daily to the online journal (http://pre.aps.org), with the date of posting listed as the publication date of the article. (It is estimated that this scheme will advance publication dates by an average of 20 days over the present one.) At monthly intervals these articles will be collected to make up the monthly printed and online issues, arranged according to the same division by subject area as stated in the previous Announcement.

In order to allow articles to be fully citable from the time that they are published electronically, a change in the bibliographic citation will be required so that the same citation can be used for the e-first article and for the article in the printed or complete online issue of the journal, while preserving the present sectioning by subjects. An article ID number will replace the familiar page number. The six digits in the article ID are a 2+2+2-digit code designating the issue number, section-heading number, and the article-sequence number (in a particular section). For example, in the January 2001 issue (01), the fifth article (05) in the Chaos and pattern formation section (section-heading number 62 for articles) would be cited as Phys. Rev. E 63, 016205 (2001), i.e., the article number is used instead of a page number.

While this scheme seems unusual at first, it offers significant advantages and flexibility: it moves publication dates up, allows immediate citability, and permits us, e.g., to append the latest article on a given subject to the end of the appropriate subject heading. In locating the articles, the reader will notice little difference since the article numbers increase monotonically in the final Table of Contents of each issue (in both the online version and the printed version of the journal). Although there is no global page numbering, pages are numbered within each article (e.g., 016205-1, 016205-2, ...). (The hyphen and additional digits are not part of the bibliographic citation.)

In both the online and printed versions of the journal, articles can be accessed via the Table of Contents for each issue. Although knowledge of the section-heading numbers is not necessary for navigating the journal, it may be of interest and is listed below.

Section Code Ranges