Samuel Goudsmit and the 1970 Split of Physical Review

During the 1960s, physics was growing in both size and scope. “Physics research today is on a very much larger scale than it was thirty to forty years ago,” Goudsmit wrote in a 1964 editorial. “In 1965 the Zeitschrift für Physik published 367 papers by 285 authors. In 1963 The Physical Review printed some 1600 papers by about 2500 authors. … On page 486 of this issue of Physical Review Letters, we find a communication which may be described as ‘twenty-seven authors in search of a plot.’” This expansion was also reflected in the increased number of manuscript submissions that Physical Review Letters was seeing. “The number of manuscripts received during the first two and a half months of 1964 was about 30% higher than the average for that period over the preceding four years,” Goudsmit noted. More papers were written by more and more authors, and the influx became too much for one journal alone to publish.

Additionally, physics found its way into to new areas of research. Two years before his 1965 proposal to divide Physical Review, Goudsmit had initially suggested splitting the journal into only two subsections: A, which would cover “the physics of atoms, molecules, and condensed matter,” and B, focused on “physics of the nucleus and elementary particles.” But it didn’t cut it. There was so much new physics happening that even dividing Physical Review in half was not enough to represent the advances in optics, cosmology, field theory, gravitation, and so on. In fact, the editorial team even outlined an analytical subject index that organized the discipline into 65 subtopics. “A drastic modification in the publishing habits of physicists is needed if we do not want our science to disintegrate into a number of minor disciplines, competing for attention,” he wrote in another 1963 editorial.

The topical organization suggested by Goudsmit and the Physical Review editorial team in 1965.

Specializations and Communication Challenges Because physics was splintering off into many new directions, it was becoming difficult for physicists to keep up with the latest findings outside their own area of expertise. Goudsmit referred to this as a “knowledge explosion,” an incredible amount of scientific information was being discovered and shared at drastically increasing rates. “With the rapid increase of available data, the theories undergo frequent changes or modifications. It has become impossible for a physicist to follow these changes except in his narrow field of specialization.” Although in Goudsmit’s opinion such a knowledge explosion had always existed, what was different then was that increased access to more information forced physicists to realize how much of it was connected to and impactful on their own ongoing research.

An important consequence of increased specialization — especially so in the context of science publishing — was that physicists were having difficulty clearly and effectively communicating their work. “In addition to using unintelligible, twisted sentences, many authors create and use slang expressions known to a few specialists only, and indulge in unnecessary abbreviations. … In fact, many papers give the impression that the author was writing a memorandum to himself merely for the benefit of a close collaborator,” Goudsmit wrote in a 1964 editorial. Although, according to Goudsmit, the “multiplication of journals is, however, not a good solution to the problem of communicating among physicists,” nevertheless this ended up being the best option at the time.

It’s clear that Goudsmit’s decision to divide Physical Review into Physical Review A-D was a consequence of intersecting trends in physics at the time: it’s expansion in size and scope, as well as increased specialization. It was Goudsmit’s hope that dividing the journal into smaller, more focused sections would more accurately encompass the breadth of physics research being done at that time.

The Physical Review Journals Today In 2019 alone, Physical Review A published 2,490 articles; Physical Review B published 5,040; Physical Review C published 991 articles, and Physical Review D published 3,686 articles. The grand total? 12,207 articles. I won’t even try to guess how many authors (and referees!) were involved in all that work. APS now manages more than fifteen subsidiary journals of Physical Review, with PRX Quantum as the most recent addition focusing on quantum information science and technology research.