One of the highest “impact” journals in physics is the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Letters (PRL). Among the crazy things about PRL is that it limits letters to four pages. Yes, people from other fields, you heard that right: one of the most “prestigious” journals in physics limits the authors to four pages. Realistically, when you include references, a title, and an abstract, this really means more like less than three and a half pages. Crazy!
Recently looking over papers in PRL, however, it occurred to me that the editors are skewering us even more. That’s because a good two lines (two full lines, damnit!) are being used to denote PACS numbers and DOI
O brave new quantum world!
Well, DOI is understandable, I guess, but it should be on the foot of the page, not below the abstract. But in the digital search age, there is no more need for PACS.
I can’t resist mentioning that I recently had a paper that I sent to PRL and one of the referees recommended to reject it because “this paper doesn’t contain PACS numbers”, (well to be fair he or she had other complaints, but come on!)