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September 2011

Advice to Referees for Reviews of Modern Physics

Thank you for agreeing to referee an article for Reviews of Modern Physics. We ask you to consider especially the following four areas of concern, on which we would welcome your comments.

1. Accessibility. The audience of RMP includes physicists from a broad range of fields and graduate students still considering possible areas of specialization. Many of these readers will not be familiar with the background of the topic under discussion or 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.
2. 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 requires making critical judgments and organizing the material accordingly. Sometimes a table or two can provide a useful summary. It is customary to end the review with a look at the open problems remaining and some likely future directions for research.
3. Balance. RMP strives to publish reviews of topics in which there is much research activity, and most of these reviews are written by authors who have made important contributions. We expect that their contributions will be treated in the review and we do not object if they openly admit to a bias for their own approaches. However, a reviewer has the obligation to deal with other points of view fairly and to be sure that all important work is represented.
4. 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 for. Hence it is important that some choices be made in what to include and how much space to devote to each section.