Announcement: Electronic-First Publication and Article Numbers (July 1, 1999)

Beginning with Volume 60 (July 1999), Physical Review C will publish each article as soon as it is ready; i.e., after the page proofs are returned by the authors and prepared for electronic publication. Each article is published in its final form, including the final bibliographic citation. New articles are added daily to the online journal (http://prc.aps.org/ [1]), with the date of posting being listed as the publication date of the article. At monthly intervals these articles are collected together to make up the printed issues.

A change in the bibliographic citation was required so that the same citation can be used for the e-first article and for the article that appears in the monthly journal issue, while keeping a division into subject sections. An article ID number replaces the familiar page number. The six digits in the article ID are a 2+2+2-digit code designating the issue number, section-heading number, and the article sequence number (in a particular section). For example, in the July 1999 issue (01), the (fictitious) ninth article (09) in the Nuclear Astrophysics section (section-heading number 58) would be cited as Phys. Rev. C 60, 015809 (1999), i.e., the article number is used instead of a page number.

While this scheme may seem unusual at first, it offers significant flexibility--it permits one to append the latest article on a given subject to the end of the appropriate subject heading, rather than at the end of the issue. In use the reader will notice little difference, since the article numbers increase monotonically in the final Table of Contents of the issue (in both the online version and the printed version of the journal). Although there is no global page numbering, pages are numbered within each article (e.g., 015809-1, 015809-2,...; the hyphen and additional digits should not be used when citing the article).

In the online version of the journal, articles can be accessed via the Table of Contents for the appropriate issue. If the article number is known, one can use the Volume/Article Number lookup that can be found on the journal home page and on the online journal pages.

Although knowledge of the two-digit section-heading numbers is not necessary for navigating the journal, it may be of interest.