Speaker: Yiming Xu (Senior Associate Editor of PRX)

Host: Jigang Wang

Title: PRX: What Kind of Papers We are Looking for? 

Abstract: PRX is published by the American Physical Society, a nonprofit membership society of scientists.  Its mission goal is to select around 200 *landmark* papers a year from all fields of physics and showcase them to a broad and multidisciplinary readership.  Is your paper a good match for PRX?  Or asked differently, what papers qualify as *landmark* papers?  How do the PRX editors actually select such papers?  Are such selections always accurate? How can you, as an author, navigate PRX’s editorial and peer-review process effectively and get the most out of your interactions with the editors and referees? 

I will use the talk to discuss with you how to answer these questions.  Many of these questions do not have a black-and-white answer in the case of a single paper.  Open-minded, reasoned, and constructive dialogues amongst the authors, the editors, and the referees are key to making each concrete process a meaningful and productive experience, and sometimes even a pleasure, for everyone.  

Bio: Yiming Xu received his B.Sc. from Nanjing University in China and his Ph.D. from Boston College, both in experimental condensed matter physics. Prior to joining PRX in 2014, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Materials Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focus was on the electronic properties of strongly correlated materials.