One Year Later: Physical Review Fluids

By Rachel Gaal

One of the largest membership units of APS, the Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) recently hosted its 69th annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, where over 3,000 attendees participated in conference events. A feature at the APS exhibitors booth was the new journal Physical Review Fluids — the most recent addition to the Physical Review collection.

The initial request to create a new fluids journal was presented to APS in 2014 and Physical Review Fluids journal completed its first volume at the end of 2016. Although Physical Review Fluids is still in its infancy, the editors are positive about the journal’s progress.

"We are very happy with our first volume, both in terms of quality and the scope we have covered," writes John Kim of the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-lead editor of Physical Review Fluids, in an email to APS News. "[Our submissions] so far have ranged from fundamental fluid mechanics to applications, to energy creation and harvesting, biology, forensics, understanding of climate change, all the way to the implications of landing on Mars."

With help from the two lead editors, Kim and Gary Leal of University of California, Santa Barbara, 12 associate editors and 17 editorial board members, the journal has attracted hundreds of papers. About 75% of submissions are from the United States, Canada, and Europe, and a steady 60 submissions are being received each month. Kim and Leal are former editors of the journal Physics of Fluids, published by the American Institute of Physics Publishing.

"While this is a great result for a journal in this field, and especially for a new journal that has yet to be indexed, [the submission rate] is still about 30% less than the top competitors," says Luigi Longobardi, the Physical Review Fluids journal manager at APS. "What is more important for us is to attract a healthy number of papers, but we also want high quality content. From this point of view, we are about to close a very strong first volume at the end of 2016."

After enough citation data are collected, Physical Review Fluids will be included in the Science Citation Index (SCI) — a system that ranks a journal's "impact factor" in its respective fields.

"The current submission [rate] is about one half of what we used to receive in Physics Of Fluids … in large part due to the fact that Physical Review Fluids is not yet included in SCI, which is the major consideration for the authors in Asian countries. We hope that we will reach that point soon, and we expect that Physical Review Fluids will be indexed sometime early next year, [which] will certainly increase the total number of submissions," says Kim.

The editorial board of Physical Review Fluids hopes to maintain and leverage close ties with the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics. Beginning in 2017, Physical Review Fluids will feature the prize winners of the Gallery of Fluid Motion, and invited papers from the annual DFD meeting. The gallery is an array of short video clips and poster images that highlight the aesthetic beauty of fluid motion and typically draws in crowds of all backgrounds to the DFD meetings.

"Being part of the highly recognized Physical Review family is increasing our recognition," Kim adds. "...In the future, in addition to traditional fluid mechanics topics, we would like to expand more into areas such as bio-related fluid dynamics, including swimming and flying, micro- and nano-scale fluid dynamics, flows of complex fluids and soft materials, geophysical and environmental flows."

To learn more about Physical Review Fluids, visit the website.