Physical Review Letters

Physical Review Letters (PRL), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. The journal is considered one of the most prestigious in the field of physics. Over a quarter of Physics Nobel Prize-winning papers between 1995 and 2017 were published in it.^[1]

Physical Review Letters

Discipline	Physics
Language	English
Edited by	Hugues Chaté Robert Garisto Samindranath Mitra
Publication details
History	1958–present
Publisher	American Physical Society (United States)
Frequency	Weekly
Open access	partial
Impact factor	9.0 (2024)
Standard abbreviations ISO 4 (alt) · Bluebook (alt) NLM (alt) · MathSciNet (alt )
ISO 4	Phys. Rev. Lett.
Indexing CODEN (alt · alt2) · JSTOR (alt) · LCCN (alt) MIAR · NLM (alt) · Scopus · W&L
CODEN	PRLTAO
ISSN	0031-9007 (print) 1079-7114 (web)
LCCN	59037543
OCLC no.	1715834
CD-ROM issue
ISSN	1092-0145
Links
Journal homepage Archives

PRL is published both online and as a print journal. Its focus is on short articles ("letters") intended for quick publication. The Lead Editor is Hugues Chaté. The Managing Editor is Robert Garisto.^[2][3]

History

The journal was created in 1958. Samuel Goudsmit, who was then the editor of Physical Review, the American Physical Society's flagship journal, organized and published Letters to the Editor of Physical Review into a new standalone journal, which became Physical Review Letters. It was the first journal intended for the rapid publication of short articles, a format that eventually became popular in many other fields.^[4]

Notable articles

• 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers
• First report of a functional scanning tunneling microscope (1982)^[5]
• Invention of the atomic force microscope (1986)^[6]
• First observation of gravitational waves (2016)^[7]

Scope

PRL covers all areas of physics. The journal is divided into the following sections:^[2][8][9]

• General Physics: Statistical and Quantum mechanics, Quantum information, etc.
• Gravitation and astrophysics
• Elementary particles and fields
• Nuclear physics
• Atomic, molecular, and optical physics
• Nonlinear dynamics, Fluid dynamics, Classical optics, etc.
• Plasma and beam physics
• Condensed matter: Structure, etc.
• Condensed Matter: Semiconductor-Electronic properties, etc.
• Polymer, Soft matter, Biological, and Interdisciplinary physics

A section before the table of contents highlights a small number of particularly notable articles in each edition.^[8][9]

Journal ranking summary

The following table presents the most recent journal ranking metrics for Physical Review Letters based on data from Scopus and Web of Science categories.

Journal ranking summary (2023) ^[10]

Source	Category	Rank	Percentile	Quartile
Scopus	General Physics and Astronomy in Physics and Astronomy	13/243	94.65	Q1
Web of Science (IF)	Physics, Multidisciplinary	8/110	93.20	Q1
Web of Science (JCI)	Physics, Multidisciplinary	8/110	92.73	Q1

Abstracting, indexing, and impact factor

Physical Review Letters is indexed in the following bibliographic databases:^[2]

• Chemical Abstracts
• Computer & Control Abstracts
• Current Physics Index
• Electrical & Electronics Index
• Energy Research Abstracts
• GeoRef
• INSPEC
• International Aerospace Abstracts
• Mathematical Reviews
• Medline
• Metals Abstracts
• Nuclear Science Abstracts
• Physics Abstracts
• PubSCIENCE
• SPIN
• World Aluminum Abstracts

See also

• American Journal of Physics
• Annales Henri Poincaré
• CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics