Too many journals in China
The number of papers published by Chinese scientists in journals monitored by the US-based Institute for Scientific Information has grown from 3475 in 1983 to 10 033 in 1997. However, the proportion p...
Cosmology bestsellers
1. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene A fascinating and thought-provoking journey through the mysteries of space, time, and ma...
New look for PhysicsWeb
As part of the redesign we have also moved the In Depth and Patent News services to the News section, and moved WebWatch to a new expanded Reviews section. We have also put the 1997 and 1998 indexes f...
Are printed journals heading for extinction?
Scientific publishing is still a highly profitable business. According to Nature, the scientific side of the Reed-Elsevier publishing company made a profit of $378m on sales of $938m in 1997. However,...
How to write a best-seller
Every morning Caroline Davidson goes into her office in west London and rifles through her “slush pile”. Like all literary agents, she hopes that buried deep within the daily deluge of boo...
Why some papers last longer that others
The survey was carried out by using the Science Citation Index to count the number of citations received by papers published in 1954 volume of the Astrophysical Journal in each of the 40 following yea...
PhD theses to go online
The DFG has been experimenting with different ways of digitizing postgraduate dissertations for some time. These documents are usually one of the hardest sets of scientific information to access becau...
Ten years after
The first news story in that first issue was a sneak preview of the Edwards’ report on the future of physics departments in UK universities, which concluded that 20 staff and 200 full-time-equiv...
Physics top ten
Brief History of Time : From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking The author explores the outer reaches of our knowledge of astrophysics and the nature of time and the universe, and reviews ...
In brief: Yuri Gagarin and Gregory Benford
Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Piers Bizony and Jamie Doran Bloomsbury p256 £12.59 On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to leave the Earth’s...
