Comments - Publishing in a Physics Journal

[ZapperZ]

ZapperZ submitted a new PF Insights post

Publishing in a Physics Journal

Continue reading the Original PF Insights Post.

 

[mfb]

These are all things that you will pick up along the way as you write your first, and subsequent papers. There’s no way to learn other than by doing it yourself.

Get paper drafts from others and review them, then discuss your comments with others.
This is always done in experimental particle physics within the collaborations, but it is possible elsewhere too.

Physics papers tend to have figures, especially graphs.

... and you should be able to change elements in the graph easily (i. e. not with photoshop) because you probably have to do so between the first draft and the final paper.

[Addendum to the original article – In experimental high energy physics papers, the number of people participating in the work can be HUGE, often more than a hundred. It is usually difficult to pick a single person who did more work than others in such a collaboration. So for such papers, the authors are listed alphabatically using their last names.]

For the same reason, it is also typical that the collaborations maintain a single author list. Everyone on that list gets listed as author for every paper, regardless of the contribution to this specific paper.

Preprint servers could be worth a note, given their importance in some fields.

 

[blue_leaf77]

Sometimes I found papers accompanied by a supplementary material, in whcih usually the author elaborates his method and/or derivations to the formulae appearing in the main paper. Is there also limitation on the number of page of the supplementary material?

 

[mfb]

If the supplementary material is managed by the journal, it might depend on the journal.
In high-energy physics (probably elsewhere as well but I don't know) this material is available independently of the journal, so there is no page limit. Sometimes you even get an internal support note for a public support note, which can have 200+ pages.

 

[ZapperZ]

Sometimes I found papers accompanied by a supplementary material, in whcih usually the author elaborates his method and/or derivations to the formulae appearing in the main paper. Is there also limitation on the number of page of the supplementary material?

As mfb said, it depends on the journal. Often the supplementary part is available only online, it isn't refereed, and it is usually minimally formatted and typeset. This means that the cost, if any, to the journal is minimal. So I doubt that it counts as part of the publication fee. How that is handled in journals such as PRL that has a strict page limit, I'm not sure.

Zz.