We are happy to welcome our new editor Mukund Rangamani from Durham University to the editorial board of Living Reviews in Relativity! He is taking over the responsibilities for the field of “String Theory and Gravitation” from Don Marolf, who will continue to be a member of the board.
High Impact Factor for MPG Open Access Journal
Living Reviews in Relativity second 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, has received its first impact factor of 10.600 in the 2009 Journal Citation Reports released by Thomson Reuters on June 17, 2010. The unique review journal ranks second in the category Physics, Particles & Fields.
Living Reviews were initiated by Max Planck director Bernard Schutz in 1998. The concept of ‘living’ articles is taking advantage of web-based electronic publishing, allowing authors to frequently incorporate the latest developments and research findings by updating their reviews. To ensure high-quality scientific content, all articles are subject to peer review and solicited by an international editorial board from experts in their fields.
Today, Living Reviews in Relativity maintains 68 topical reviews, which have been cited more than 4,800 times by other authors. The journal has become one of the first places scientists look for information about work in the fields of gravitational physics. Its successful concept was adopted by other publications in various fields ranging from astronomy to political science. Currently, 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 the University of Zurich.
The Journal Impact Factor is one of the most widely used tools for assessing scientific journals. It allows users to objectively evaluate a journal’s performance and its influence on research globally. The impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations to those papers that were published during the two preceding years.
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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:
Hyperspace@aei has been designed and developed to increase the exchange of information and foster the interaction among scientists working in general relativity and gravitation. It replaces the QMUL hyperspace service, which has been maintained for 20 years by Malcolm MacCallum. The new site is edited by Luciano Rezzolla with support from the Max Planck Digital Library, the Living Reviews team, and it is hosted at the Albert Einstein Institute (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) in Germany. This site is also sponsored by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, (ISGRG).
Hyperspace@aei provides the opportunity to post announcements about conferences, job opportunities, and general news. All of this information can be easily accessed on the site and is collected in the form of a bulletin which is sent to the hyperspace mailing list (which replaces MacCallum’s GRG list) at the beginning of each month. In addition, the information in the bulletin is also stored in calendars and RSS feeds which can be browsed on the site but also imported for private use.
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:
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.
Shown are the results of an online user survey of Living Reviews in Relativity which was conducted from September 2008 to February 2009. The survey aimed to find out where readers come from, their professional background and their reading and download habits. The analysis is based on 80 completed questionnaires, 60 by readers with a scientific background, and 20 by non-scientists. The largest group of readers who took part in the survey came from Europe, the second largest from the United States, and third one from India. A very satisfactory result is that more than half visit Living Reviews in Relativity at least once a month.
A short interview on the journal Living Reviews in Relativity with editor-in-chief Bernard Schutz has been published by Andreas Trunschke on his Weblog Forschung in Brandenburg.
Prof. Schutz explains the concept of a scientific review and highlights the advantage of regularly updated online articles for researchers. The interview (Nr. 19) is part of a blog post introducing the work of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute).
We would like to draw your attention to a new electronic journal on low-frequency gravitational waves science. In cooperation with the Digital Editions group of the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), GW Notes is published by the MPI for Gravitational Physics (AEI).
What:
The e-journal, GW Notes, has been born from the need for a journal where the distinct communities involved in gravitation wave research might gather. While these three communities – Astrophysics, General Relativity and Data Analysis – have made significant collaborative progress over recent years, we believe that it is indispensable to future advancement that they draw closer, and that they speak a common idiom.
Why:
The electronic publishing service arXiv is a dynamic, well-respected source of news of recent work and is updated daily. But, perhaps due to the large volume of new work submitted, it is probable that a member of our community might easily overlook relevant material. This new e-journal proposes to offer scientists of the Gravitational Wave community the opportunity to more easily follow advances in the three areas mentioned: Astrophysics, General Relativity and Data Analysis.
How:
We hope to achieve this by selecting the most significant e-prints and list them in abstract form with a link to the full paper in both a single e-journal (GW Notes) and a blog (LISA Brownbag).
Whenever you see an interesting paper on GW science and LISA, you can submit the arXiv number to our submission page:
http://brownbag.lisascience.org/
This is straightforward:
No registration is required (although recommended, see ahead) to simply type in the number in the entry field of the page, indicate some keywords and submit. Don’t expect it to be immediately displayed in the blog. The submission will be reviewed to check it suits the blog.
You can register here:
http://lists.aei.mpg.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lisa_brownbag
Note:
Of course, this also implies that the paper will have its impact increased, since it will reach a broader public, so that we encourage you to not forget submitting your own work.
In addition to the abstracts, in each PDF issue of GW Notes (released quarterly), we will offer you a previously unpublished article written by a senior researcher in one of these three domains, which addresses the interests of all readers:
http://brownbag.lisascience.org/lisa-gw-notes/
Bernard Schutz and Pau Amaro-Seoane
Editors