Physical Review Physics Education Research
Physical Review Physics Education Research is a trusted open access journal for high-quality, significant experimental and theoretical research related to the teaching and learning of physics and astronomy.
A Joint Venture
PRPER coordinates with other members of the Physical Review family of journals to serve new subspecialties as they develop.
PRPER publishes detailed research articles, review articles, and replication studies. Descriptions of the development and use of new assessment tools, presentation of research techniques, and methodology comparisons or critiques are welcomed. The journal has a flexible approach to article lengths and welcomes submission of longer papers that provide depth and authority in their subject areas.
By Researchers, For Researchers
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRPER is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This ensures that its mission, standards, and policies prioritize the needs of researchers and the broader scientific community; this commitment is reinforced by APS’s promise as a founding member of the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition.
PRPER covers all educational levels, from elementary through graduate education. All topics in experimental and theoretical physics education research are accepted, including, but not limited to:
- Educational policy
- Instructional strategies, and materials development
- Research methodology
- Epistemology, attitudes, and beliefs
- Learning environment
- Scientific reasoning and problem solving
- Diversity and inclusion
- Learning theory
- Student participation
- Faculty and teacher professional development
Submitted manuscripts should meet the following criteria:
- Present results of importance to the field.
- Generate interest for PRPER’s readers.
- Represent an authoritative and substantive addition to the body of literature.
- This journal is funded through article publication charges (APCs), which are due once an article is accepted for publication.
- All articles are published with an open CC-BY (4.0 International) license with authors retaining copyright. This license permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. APS reviews APCs regularly to ensure that it offers a reasonable and cost-effective publishing option for authors in line with APS’s status as a not-for-profit society publisher.
- APS authors are free to post the final version of their articles on their laboratory, institutional or departmental web sites.
- APS offers authors from lower-income countries the opportunity to publish open access at no cost by automatically offering APC waivers for articles accepted into all hybrid and gold open access titles. Learn more here.
Editorial Board
The PRPER Editorial Board is a diverse, global group of active, distinguished researchers, selected by editors in consultation with APS units and AAPT representatives and appointed by the Executive Editor. Board members serve three-year terms. They may be requested by the editors to advise at any stage of the review process and they serve as adjudicators in formal appeals.
Editorial Team
PRPER is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRPER acceptance criteria.
High Visibility and Impact
PRPER authors gain high visibility and achieve broad dissemination of their work in this open-access physics education research journal. PRPER editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
- Online Visibility: Newly published papers are accompanied by short descriptions (teasers) and key images online.
- Focused Collections: PRPER publishes Focused Collections, which collate works on particular topics of interest to the physics education research community.
- Multimedia: Video multimedia files are being accepted for online publication in PRPER. A video file will be linked from a static figure containing one or more “snapshot” frames from the video.
- Editors’ Suggestions: Selected papers are chosen as Editors’ Suggestions to direct readers to interesting, important, and well-written articles in areas of research beyond their usual interests. They garner, on average, more downloads and citations than other papers published in the journal and are more frequently covered by news outlets.
- Featured in Physics: Editors regularly notify Physics, APS’s daily online news and commentary publication, about important papers, resulting in coverage in the forms of Synopsis, Focus, or Viewpoint.
- Publicity: APS promotes press-worthy papers from its journals to journalists through a weekly Tip Sheet, resulting in frequent coverage in industry publications and the popular press, such as Physics World and Business Insider.
- Indexing: ISI (Science Citation Index®), Scopus, Inspec, Google Scholar
- Follow APS on Social Media:
- X: @PhysRevPER
- LinkedIn: @APSPhysics
- Facebook: @APSPhysics
- Instagram: @APSPhysics
- WeChat: @APSPhysics
Editorial and Publishing Policies
All journals published by APS follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRPER is published electronically one article at a time. Articles are identified by volume number and a six-digit article number, for example, Journal 1, XXXXXX (2020).
PRPER editors can decide to accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.