MPG Open Access Journal ranks best in its category

The open access physics journal Living Reviews in Relativity, published by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, leads the category Physics, Particles & Fields in the 2010 Journal Citation Reports released by Thomson Reuters on June 29, 2011. The unique review journal received an impact factor of 12.625, thus improving last year’s performance and rising to #95 in JCR’s complete list of almost 8000 indexed journals.

In March 2011, Living Reviews in Relativity has published its 100th review article in the field of relativity and gravitational physics. The journal currently maintains 72 articles on various topics, which are regularly updated by their authors to incorporate the latest developments and research findings.

Living Reviews‘ successful concept was adopted by other publications in other fields ranging from astronomy to political science. To date, five Living Reviews journals are published by partners from the Max Planck Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and ECSA, the Leibniz Association, and the ETH and University of Zurich.

The second journal of the family, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, was just included in Thomson Reuters‘ JCR and SCI in April 2011, therefore missing the deadline for the 2010 Journal Citation Reports by only a few days. However, it would have had received an impressive first impact factor of about 11, ranking 4th in the category Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Although controversial, the Journal Impact Factor is one of the most widely used tools for assessing scientific journals. It allows users to evaluate a journal’s performance and its influence on research. The impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations to those papers that were published during the two preceding years.

Living Reviews in Solar Physics has been accepted for coverage in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index (SCI), beginning with volume 5 (2008). The journal will be indexed and abstracted in SCI, JCR and Current Contents. Living Reviews in Solar Physics, an open access review journal published by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, is thus eligible for the Journal Impact Factor, which is seen to be a widely accepted indicator of a journal’s significance within its field.

P.S.: http://science.thomsonreuters.com/forum/2011/201106/journallist/

Living Reviews in Relativity has introduced a new LaTeX macro that allows authors to link their articles to an identifier query in the SIMBAD Astronomical Database. SIMBAD provides basic data, cross-identifications, bibliography and measurements for astronomical objects outside the solar system. It currently contains information about more than 4.6 million objects with 235,000 bibliographical references.

Sample LRR articles linking to SIMBAD:

• “Binary and Millisecond Pulsars” by Duncan R. Lorimer (lrr-2008-8)
• “The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems” by Konstantin A. Postnov and Lev R. Yungelson (lrr-2006-6)
• “Testing General Relativity with Pulsar Timing” by Ingrid H. Stairs (lrr-2003-5)

On 10 July 2009, the European Research Papers Archive (ERPA) network added Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG) to their database.

ERPA is a continuously updated reference for online working papers in the field of European integration research since 1998. Today, it contains over 1330 top research papers.

Its powerful search-engine allows searches for authors, paper titles, publication dates, keywords, full text, or any combination of these. Furthermore, “Quick Search” updates you on the latest entries in the ERPA database. Also abstracts are available for many papers.

Thanks to crossref’s excellent OpenURL interface, we’ve been able to find quite a few DOIs for records in our reference databases which previously had none.

More precisely:

• 6580 new DOIs for the reference database of the two physics journals,
• 111 for Living Reviews in European Governance and
• 77 for Living Reviews in Landscape Research.

Using the Google Books API we also managed to add links to book previews for many of our reference records.

So if you know the journals but haven’t checked out the reference databases yet: they just got a little more useful.

Thomson Reuters has selected Living Reviews in Relativity for coverage in their information services. The journal is now indexed and abstracted in SCI, JCR and Current Contents. Thus, it will be listed with a Journal Impact Factor in the 2009 JCR edition, to be released in June 2010.

LRLR is now listed by CAB International in CAB Abstracts. ISI Web of Knowledge also includes LRLR to those customers who cover CAB Abstracts by their ISI licence.

With today’s publication, the Living Reviews reference database contains more than 15,000 citations of resources in the field of relativity.

These references are carefully selected by our authors and collected from all articles published in Living Reviews in Relativity.

Cross-linked from the database to their point of reference in each article, and linked to available resources online, they provide a valuable tool for scientists.

A web interface to the database includes several search strategies. Various bibliographic export formats allow easy transfer to researchers’ own reference collections.

EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete database now indexes the full texts of Living Reviews in Relativity and Living Reviews in Solar Physics.

Thereby, these journals are also visible to ‘traditional’ literature research, as this service is available in many academic libraries.

In addition to web search engines, article metadata are also made available through databases and harvesters such as ADS, arXiv, OAIster, Scientific Commons, and others.

SPIRES-HEP, run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), has included 15 Living Reviews in Relativity articles in its Guide to Review Literature in High-Energy Physics. The guide indexes by topic “review papers that have a significant number of citations in the SPIRES-HEP database”.

Moreover, four reviews published in LRR have made it to The 50 most highly cited papers of All Time (2006 edition) in the gr-qc archive.

Another nice confirmation of the journal’s success!