Electronic-First Publication and Article Numbers (November 1, 2000)

In recent years, the physics community has become increasingly accustomed to accessing the current literature electronically. In response to this, Physical Review B will be introducing a change in the production process, beginning with the January 2001 issue (Volume 63, Number 1). Under the new system, which has been adopted by all of the Physical Review journals, all articles are first posted electronically, with the print and online versions of the complete issue appearing at a subsequent date. Both versions will continue to be visually identical.

In making this change, more emphasis is placed on the archival nature of the online version, the print version becoming a secondary product of the online version. After page proofs are returned by the authors, 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://prb.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 regular intervals these articles will be collected to make up the bimonthly print and online issues of B1 and B15, arranged according to the same division by subject area as previously.

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. The same citation will be used for the e-first article and for the article in the print or complete online issue of the journal, while preserving the present sectioning by subject matter. 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 Magnetism section (section-heading number 44 for articles) would be cited as Phys. Rev. B 63, 014405 (2001), i.e., the article number is used instead of a page number.

This scheme offers significant advantages and flexibility: it moves publication dates up and allows immediate citability. In use, 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 print version of the journal). Although there is no global page numbering, pages are numbered within each article (e.g., 014405-1, 014405-2, ...). (The hyphen and additional digits are not part of the bibliographic citation.)

In both the online and print versions of the journal, articles can be accessed via the Table of Contents for each issue. Knowledge of the section-heading numbers is not necessary for navigating the journal; however they may be of interest and are listed below.

Article Type and Subject Area Numbers