Referees play a crucial role in evaluating manuscripts submitted to the Physical Review journals. Physical Review editors work closely with referees to apply the acceptance criteria stringently and to act promptly in accepting or rejecting manuscripts. Your active collaboration as a referee is central to the success of the journals.
The email invitation to review includes links to accept or decline. Before you accept, please ensure that the manuscript content is close enough to your area of expertise to allow you to provide useful input and a prompt review. If that is not the case, please decline; your suggestions for alternate reviewers are welcomed.
All materials associated with the review process are confidential, including the manuscript, Supplemental Material, author-provided material, referee reports, and other correspondence. These materials must remain confidential when you consult with colleagues or invite them to write a joint report. We ask that you include the names and contact information of any colleagues who help in writing the report. When you are reviewing a manuscript, please do not initiate discussions with the author(s); instead, please contact the editors with your inquiry.
It is vitally important for reviewers to disclose any conflicts of interest to the editors. Please let them know if you have a direct competitive, collaborative, or other relationship with an author that could preclude your objective evaluation of the manuscript. It is unethical for you to use the content of a manuscript sent to you for review for your own scientific purposes. The Physical Review journals are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics and follow its guidelines. See also Appropriate Use of AI-Based Writing Tools.
Referees for RMP should comment on the following four areas of concern in their reviews.
Accessibility. RMP’s audience includes physicists from a broad range of fields and graduate students still considering possible areas of specialization. Many of these readers will be unfamiliar with the background of the topic under discussion and with the specialized jargon of the field. A clear introduction to the topic, both historical and analytical, is therefore an important part of every RMP review.
Organization and overview. For the practitioner, a review presents the current status of a given topic. It surveys the literature, of course, but an ideal review is more than a catalog of work done. It is a critical distillation of the progress on the topic, sorting out the main approaches and identifying the most successful. This goal requires authors to make critical judgments and organize the material accordingly. Sometimes a table or two can provide a useful summary. It is customary to end a review with a discussion on the open problems in the field and likely directions for future research.
Balance. RMP strives to publish reviews of topics in which there is significant research activity. Most reviews are written by researchers who have made important contributions in the area covered by a review. We expect that their contributions will be discussed in the review, and we do not object if they openly admit to a bias for their own approaches. However, reviewers should comment on whether a review deals with other points of view fairly and whether it represents all the important work on the topic.
Economy vs. completeness. RMP has a length limit of 50,000 words per article. We believe that this length is not only adequate to review most topics, it is also as much as most readers will have time to read. Hence it is important that some choices be made in what to include and how much space to devote to each section.
Recommendation: Your report should include a recommendation to accept, revise and reconsider, or reject the manuscript. Please provide reasons for your recommendation.
Comments intended for the Editors only: When submitting your report, you may include confidential remarks for the editor. These comments may include your thoughts on why the paper is right or wrong for the particular journal, reasons behind your recommendation, or other information you feel would be useful.
When writing your report, please formulate it in gender-neutral terms. If unavoidable, please use the singular “they/them/theirs” in place of gender-specific pronouns.
