American Journal of Physics®
The American Journal of Physics publishes papers that will support, inform, and delight a diverse audience of college and university physics teachers.
To be publishable in AJP, a manuscript must be written for a broad range of physicists and must be useful, interesting, and accessible. Technical correctness and novelty are necessary, but they are not sufficient conditions for acceptance. Clarity of exposition and potential interest to the readers are also essential. It is the reader, not the author, who must receive the benefit of the doubt.
Manuscripts should be directly useful in the classroom or should provide valuable insight to instructors. They may describe new approaches to teaching or present interesting additions to course content and assignments. While most papers will focus on the intermediate and advanced undergraduate curriculum, some will be aimed at post-graduate programs. Pedagogical value can be added to all articles by including suggested problems or projects for students. Examples include problems with analytical solutions, computational exercises and simulations, and the analysis of experimental data.
Manuscripts that introduce new laboratory or demonstration apparatus, techniques, or exercises are welcome. Although brief papers that describe only how to build a new apparatus are acceptable, authors are also encouraged to share observations of how students interact with the apparatus. Manuscripts that propose new student experiments based on novel uses of existing apparatus are also acceptable. In all cases, the approximate cost of the apparatus should be included, along with information on how to obtain the components.
Manuscripts may demonstrate new relations between seemingly unrelated areas of physics or clarify past misunderstandings. However, AJP cannot serve as a venue to correct every error that has appeared in print.
Manuscripts may discuss events in physics history that are interesting to instructors.
Manuscripts on contemporary research topics are appropriate when they support teaching. Students may enjoy learning how course material applies to current research. The emphasis should be less on presenting the new research and more on using it as a motivation for learning. Sometimes a research area becomes so well established that it should be added to the curriculum. This case happens rarely, and prospective authors are urged to consult with the editor before writing the manuscript.
Using undergraduate-level physics to solve interesting or puzzling real-world problems can be valuable. The interest of the problem to the readership must be sufficient to motivate the work required to understand the solution. If these topics are studied by specialists in fields outside of physics, then it is essential that the writer is aware of this work and provides citations to the most relevant articles.
Shorter manuscripts are more desirable than longer ones. Authors should consider submitting longer derivations, additional applications, program scripts, and data tables as supplementary material.
AJP strives to present a carefully curated sampling of the most readable and interesting articles related to physics teaching. The importance of graceful, clear, accessible writing cannot be overemphasized. AJP is not a research journal, and the question of how many readers will be interested in the manuscript is a consideration in evaluating it.
Most readers will not be specialists in the particular subject matter presented. Introductory paragraphs should carefully present context and motivation and should explain how the manuscript builds on and differs from previous work. References should be carefully curated, and the text should make it clear why each work was cited and what the reader will find there. Failure to cite very closely related work is a sign that the author is unaware of it and may result in rejection without review.
AJP accepts submissions of Regular Articles, Notes and Discussion, Instructional Laboratories and Demonstrations, Computational Physics, Guest Editorials, and Letters to the Editor. Regular articles should usually not exceed six journal pages, with notes and other contributions being substantially shorter. Notes are short communications that are usually confined to the discussion of a single concept or comments on previously published articles. Instructional Laboratories and Demonstrations generally focus on new apparatus and techniques. Letters to the Editor are selected for their likely interest to readers. Book Reviews and Resource Letters are solicited, not contributed, and undergo a separate review process.
Collegial disagreement has a proper place in the Journal, but extended argumentation does not. To encourage the former and discourage the latter, the editors will forward to authors any communications that are critical of their published work. Authors and critics will then be asked to correspond directly with one another and encouraged to prepare a brief jointly-authored Note. If such an agreement is not possible, the critic’s Note may be published alone, or followed by the authors’ response if it makes a significant addition to the discussion. Letters to the editor are also appropriate for briefer comments on an article; these will be published following the same procedure as for Notes, although without necessarily requiring peer review. In no case will there be more than one round of discussion of a paper.
Why was my paper rejected?
The harder a paper is to read, the more useful and rewarding must be its result. Papers should significantly aid the teaching and learning of physics rather than primarily displaying cleverness and erudition. Manuscripts that show new ways of understanding, explaining, or deriving familiar results must provide some original physical insight. However, new derivations that are significantly simpler than existing derivations are welcomed.
The mere solution of a problem seldom constitutes an acceptable contribution. Similarly, a laboratory exercise that measures a physical quantity is not sufficient grounds for publication unless that quantity is of significant interest to students and instructors.
AJP is not a venue to remind readers of previously published ideas and techniques, even if they have not been incorporated into current textbooks. Manuscripts on topics already available in textbooks, monographs, or other published articles and that differ from them primarily in style rather than coverage are not suitable contributions.
The Physics Education Research (PER) section of AJP is no longer published. (See the editorial in the January 2018 issue of AJP.) It is rare that the same paper can be submitted to AJP and to Physical Review Physics Education Research or other education research journals. The writing styles are quite different. The list of references will normally be much shorter in AJP than in PER journals, and the introduction will normally be significantly reduced in length. A paper for AJP should be aimed at physics instructors who wish to use research results to teach more effectively. For some papers, compelling data will be required to convince instructors that one technique is more effective than another. In those cases, some results could be placed in the main manuscript with additional data in supplementary material. Other papers provide insights that instructors will recognize as valuable even without extensive testing.
Manuscripts on teaching introductory physics that might be of use to both secondary school and university instructors should normally be submitted to AAPT’s other journal, The Physics Teacher. However, manuscripts that would not be useful to secondary school teachers or that exceed TPT’s restrictions on length or depth may be appropriate for AJP.
Manuscripts should be useful around the world. AJP may sometimes publish papers that are only useful within the U.S. educational system, but topics that are only useful outside of the U.S. educational system are generally not acceptable.
Manuscripts whose purpose is to share new physics research results are not acceptable. This is true even when the work is performed by undergraduates or when the results can be derived using undergraduate-level physics knowledge. Manuscripts questioning well-established and successful theories are not acceptable and should be submitted to a research journal for proper vetting.
AJP is not an appropriate venue for controversial subjects. Disagreements among experts should be settled within the research literature, even when the topic concerns undergraduate concepts, such as foundations of quantum mechanics.
If a manuscript is intended to support physics education, new results are not an insurmountable barrier to publication. For example, some papers will present measurements on mechanical systems with explanations that could supplement undergraduate teaching. Nevertheless, authors of such manuscripts should consider carefully whether AJP is the appropriate venue for presenting new results.
Incremental improvements to previous studies are seldom appropriate, unless the result provides significant new insight that will be valuable to a broad range of physics teachers. Authors should use caution in submitting manuscripts that solve challenges such as those posed by the International Young Physicists Tournament, since by the time the paper could be published in AJP, its solutions are likely to be well publicized in other venues, and it may be rejected once those solutions have appeared.
A paper with a likely short period of usefulness must be justified by its high current value. Rapid developments in technology can make papers rapidly obsolete, such as has happened with laboratory microcomputers or artificial intelligence.
AJP does not publish tutorials to prepare students for research. Such manuscripts have too small a potential audience to justify the large investment that AJP puts into reviewing and editing. The line between such a tutorial and an acceptable manuscript can be located by asking whether a faculty member who teaches the appropriate course but does research in a different area would be interested in incorporating this material into their course.
Although AJP is aimed at undergraduate teaching, it should not be confused with a journal for undergraduates. Instructors are the primary audience.
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