So what is the site about?
Journal clubs – groups of people who gather, regularly or otherwise, to analyse and discuss the latest scientific works – have a long and distinguished history. Many modern scientific societies grew out of such organizations, and innumerable smaller, less formal clubs have played an important role in training junior scientists and helping more senior ones keep up with new developments. Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics takes this framework and applies it, more or less unchanged, to the online era. Each month, the club’s members write commentaries on a handful of papers and post them on the site, so that members of the wider community of condensed-matter physicists can read them and offer their own thoughts in reply.
Who is behind it?
The site’s tagline – “A Monthly Selection of Interesting Papers by Distinguished Correspondents” – has a slight 19th-century ring to it, but the last two words of the phrase are certainly not a hollow boast. The 64-strong list of current corresponding members includes dozens of well-established, active researchers, several notable emeriti (such as the physics Nobel laureate Philip Anderson) and a handful of prominent up-and-comers. Keeping this melange of luminaries in line are Chandra Varma, the club’s chief organizer, and M Cristina Marchetti, a soft-matter physicist at Syracuse University.
How are papers chosen?
For the most part, that decision is left to the corresponding members, although for obvious reasons they are not allowed to submit commentaries on their own work or that of their close collaborators. Journal club guidelines also advise correspondents to select papers that will appeal to a reasonably broad audience (“about a quarter of the readership should be interested in more than one paper identified in a given month”) and to adopt a positive approach by, for example, not using commentaries to settle scores or tear apart flawed works. “Identification of a paper for being awful is strongly discouraged,” the guidelines warn, although “critical remarks…on papers chosen for their high quality are of course very welcome.”
What are some of the topics covered?
The club’s corresponding members hail from a wide range of fields including finance (Jean Philippe Bouchaud, for example) and nanoscience (Carlo Beenakker) as well as superconductivity (Catherine Kallin) and topological phases (Joel Moore). Most, though not all, choose to comment on papers that lie within or close to their own speciality. Marchetti’s most recent commentary, for example, focused on the concept of “durotaxis”, a word coined by biologists to describe how living cells move from soft to stiff regions of a substrate. In Marchetti’s chosen paper (2013 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 110 12541), the writers showed that inanimate objects such as water droplets can exhibit similar behaviour – leading her to conclude that “a careful reanalysis of simple force balance” may be needed to distinguish biochemically-driven cell movement from migration caused by passive physical processes.
Why should I visit?
Condensed-matter physics is a big field. In the first six months of 2015, around 8000 new papers with the “cond-mat” tag were submitted to the arXiv pre-print server. No-one can read all of those papers; indeed, even keeping up with one’s own small sub-field is sometimes a struggle. Hence, any organization – be it an online journal club or even (ahem) a magazine such as Physics World – that performs some kind of filtering process on this information deluge is, in our admittedly biased view, worthy of the physics community’s support.
- Enjoy the rest of the July 2015 issue of Physics World in our digital magazine or via the Physics World app for any iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. Membership of the Institute of Physics required
