The American Journal of Physics owes an enormous debt of gratitude to its committed and conscientious corps of reviewers. Your work allows us to identify potentially valuable submitted manuscripts and then to help improve them with your suggestions and constructive criticism in subsequent revisions. Because of the wide scope of papers published in AJP, the relatively high level of its focus, and the diversity of its audience, you are given the difficult, but also, we hope, unusually rewarding task of evaluating articles not merely for their technical correctness, but also for their genuine interest and usefulness.
We recognize our reviewers periodically in print, by name and en masse, but we can never prominently or often enough thank you for everything you do on behalf of AJP and its community.
If you are new to reviewing for AJP, welcome. We hope you will find reviewing for AJP to be an interesting, stimulating, and not overly time consuming exercise. We generally try to limit the subject matter of manuscripts that we send to you to your areas of expertise and the frequency of our requests to two manuscripts per year. Nevertheless, the nature of AJP's mission is such that your opinion on manuscripts outside your areas of expertise can also be valuable. You can help us tailor our relationship with you by indicating in the "Research Interests" field of your profile, your primary and secondary areas of expertise, if you are willing to look at manuscripts in other areas, and any other parameters (e.g., frequency of requests, periods of unavailability, etc) that we should be aware of.
We hope that you may already be familiar with AJP, perhaps you are even a member of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AJP's parent organization and publisher.) If not, we hope that you might gain access (via a colleague or library) to some recent issues of AJP in order to become more familiar with the types and level of articles that we endeavor to publish. In any event, we would be grateful if you would also take a few moments to read the Statement of Editorial Policy.
Thank you in advance for your assistance!
The mission of the American Journal of Physics (AJP) is to publish articles on the educational and cultural aspects of physics that are useful, interesting, and accessible to a diverse audience of physics students, educators, and researchers who are generally reading outside their specialties in order to broaden their understanding of physics and to expand and enhance their pedagogical toolkits at the undergraduate(primarily upper division) and graduate levels. We particularly encourage manuscripts that discuss already published contemporary research that can be used directly or indirectly in the classroom.
The main editorial office of AJP is currently staffed by one person—the Editor. In order to deal efficiently with the approximately 900 manuscripts that are submitted each year, AJP has recently migrated to an online editorial management system—Editorial Express (EE)—that takes care of a number of routine clerical tasks associated with conducting the external review process for manuscripts.
Because of our lack of clerical assistance, your interactions with the editorial office should normally take place entirely via web forms at the EE website as explained below. The Editor is always willing to respond to communications received by email from referees, but respectfully requests that you not use email for those tasks—i.e., 1) confirming the receipt of a request and 2) submitting a report—that can be handled automatically.
Step 1: Confirming receipt of the request to review and accepting or declining the assignment
When you receive a request to review, the manuscript to be reviewed will be attached to the request message.
In order to provide feedback to our submitters in a timely manner we generally like to receive reports within three weeks. Nevertheless, we completely understand that requests to serve as a reviewer can come at awkward times and we will cheerfully accommodate personal circumstances. Unfortunately, we find that some of our request messages are not delivered for a variety of reasons including mistaken identification of the message as spam.
So in order for us to be sure that you have received the request, that you are willing (or not) to perform the review, and to be able to make whatever accommodations may be necessary, we respectfully request that you promptly complete the confirmation form that is accessed via a unique confirmation link that you will find included in the request message.
Using this simple form you will be able to quickly accept or decline the assignment, to request an alternate nominal "due date," and to add any comments you like. If you do decline the assignment, we will greatly appreciate receiving suggestions for other qualified reviewers.
If we do not receive a prompt confirmation from you, the EE system will send automatic reminder messages. We apologize for this, but hope you will understand our need to be sure that our reviewing requests have been received in order not to delay the reviewing process for our authors.
Step 2: Writing your report
Please be aware of the following as you write your report:
- Anonymity: Remember that reports will generally be returned to submitters and shared with other reviewers in exactly the form that they are submitted. According to AJP's policy, reviewer reports are anonymous by default. Nevertheless, reviewers are permitted to reveal their identities if they choose to do so. Indeed, it will be assumed that reviewers who include their names on reports are consciously choosing to reveal their identities.
- Tone: Reviewers (and authors) should not use disrespectful language in reports (and responses to reviewers.)
- Cover letters: If you wish to convey comments to the editor that need not be shared with the submitter or other reviewers—including, for instance, comments otherwise in violation of the preceding remarks on "Tone"—you should do so in a cover letter, and indicate any specific comments which should not be conveyed to the author. Cover letters are entirely optional.
- Format: We strongly prefer to receive reports and cover letters in the form of either PDF documents or plain text (not TeX.) As a third and less desirable alternative, if you compose your report using MSWord and have no easy way to produce a PDF document, you may submit the MSWord document. We will generally convert MSWord documents to PDF (in order to strip potentially identifying information from the document "Properties") before forwarding the document to submitters and other reviewers.
Step 3: Submitting your report and (optional) cover letter
To submit your report, please use the report submission link that you will also find included in the request message. Alternatively you can use the generic "Submit a Review" link (also available directly from the AJP home page) at the cost of having to enter a little more identification.
After verifying or updating your reviewer profile, you will be presented with a page that allows you to upload (or paste into text fields) both your report and your (optional) cover letter. The form will remind you that "cover letters" are NOT shared with authors and that "reports" ARE. (Again, please remember that we strongly prefer PDF or plain text files, but can, if necessary accept MSWord documents as well.)
When all of the requested reviews have been submitted, the editor will compose and send a decision letter and then forward copies of the decision letter and the other reports to each reviewer.
AJP's publication criteria are guided by the “Statement of Editorial Policy.”
To be publishable in AJP, a manuscript should be evidently written for and useful, interesting, and accessible to physicists from outside the specific subdiscipline that is the subject of the manuscript.
Technical correctness is a necessary, but entirely insufficient criterion for acceptance. Other expectations include clarity of presentation and a significant level of general interest to AJP's diverse audience. We entertain the editorial consideration of manuscripts from authors whose native language is not English as long as the language problems are limited to correctable issues of grammar and usage and do not extend to issues of overall organization and coherence or any other language-independent elements that cause confusion and interfere with the clarity of presentation.
Criteria that are useful in evaluating the appropriateness of the manuscript include the following:
- Would it be of value to undergraduate or graduate teachers or students of physics? (This criterion does not mean that the content needs to be immediately applicable in the classroom — the benefit may be, and often is indirect. Nevertheless, the educational motivation of the manuscript should be evident and unstrained.)
- Would it aid significantly in the process of learning physics?
- Does it provide enough background information to be accessible to readers from other subdisciplines of physics.
- Does it provide physical insight?
- Does it describe new ways of understanding, demonstrating, describing or teaching physics?
- Does it take proper cognizance of previous work on the same subject, regardless of where it may have appeared?
- Is it well organized and written in a clear and interesting manner?
- Especially for more theoretical/mathematical manuscripts: Is the presentation clearly motivated by application to physical phenomena and does it provide significant insight about the phenomena?
- Especially for manuscripts significantly longer than our average of 4000 to 5000 words: Is the length justified by the value of the contents?
Manuscripts that are not acceptable under any circumstances include but are not limited to the following:
- Those announcing new theories or experimental results.
- Those that seem to have been written for research journals.
- Those that merely solve a textbook type problem.
- Those that provide a detailed calculation with little or no physical insight.
- Those that provide an alternative derivation of a standard result, without providing significant new insight, a significantly new way of thinking, or a much simpler approach.
- Those that are likely to have very limited interest.
Although it is not necessary to use a specific report form, you may wish to use one of the templates supplied here in various formats:
plain text || TeX || PDF || MSWord
You may also simply cut and paste from this web page into a word or text processor.
In any event, please address each of the following items in your report:
0. Header information. (All optional)
Date:
Manuscript #:
Title:
Author:
1. Summary. Briefly summarize why you do or do not believe this manuscript would be of interest and/or value to readers of the American Journal of Physics. (Feel free to refer to passages from the Statement of Editorial Policy.)
2. Technical correctness. Is the manuscript technically correct?
3. Attention to audience. Is the introduction sufficiently complete and the general level of presentation sufficiently accessible to the majority of AJP readers whose expertise will lie in other subdisciplines of physics?
4. Style, clarity, and grammar. Is the writing style, clarity, English grammar, etc. suitable for publication in AJP?
5. Figures and captions. Is the manuscript sufficiently and appropriately illustrated with figures and are the figures and figure captions clear and complete?
6. References. Are the references to previous work, in this journal and elsewhere, adequate? If not, please elaborate.
7. Overall recommendation. Please indicate your overall recommendation here (and in the online submission form.) Your choices and their intended interpretations are:
___ Accept (Meets publication criteria in current form)
___ Accept with Revisions (Will meet publication criteria after relatively minor revisions)
___ Strong Revise and Resubmit (Above average promise of meeting publication criteria after revision)
___ Revise and Resubmit (Average promise of meeting publication criteria after revision)
___ Weak Revise and Resubmit (Below average promise of meeting publication criteria after revision)
___ Reject (Shows too little promise to merit continued consideration)
___ Definitely Reject (Clearly unsuitable for publication in AJP by virtue either of being fundamentally wrong or of other fundamental, uncorrectable failure to meet AJP criteria. Please specify elsewhere.)
8. Nature of the manuscript. (Check all that apply.) Please indicate whether the manuscript ...
... is directly applicable to the classroom in
___ introductory physics courses
___ undergraduate physics major courses
___ graduate physics courses
... is not directly applicable to the classroom, but provides insights and background that are likely to have a significant impact on the classroom in
___ introductory physics courses
___ undergraduate physics major courses
___ graduate physics courses
... is not directly applicable to the classroom, but
___ of general cultural interest.
9. Additional Commentary (Please use as much additional space as you like to provide additional commentary and, if you are recommending revision, suggestions for improvement.)