System Requirements: To use the Reviews of Modern Physics (RMP) web site, the following hardware and software are recommended: Hardware: Windows PC: Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95/98, or Windows NT; 386SX processor; 1Mb free space on hard drive; 4 to 8Mb RAM; Winsock TCP/IP. Macintosh System 7.0 or better; 68030 processor; 2Mb free space on hard drive; 4 to 8Mb RAM TCP/IP or MacTCP. Unix Workstation or X‐terminal: According to the RMP Help screens, “Any Unix workstation or X‐terminal capable of running a graphical web browser can be used as long as it has access to the Internet.” (http://rmp.aps.org/help/hardware.dtl). Printers: Greyscale support is required for printing from the RMP web site.
Software: Reviews of Modern Physics supports the current production versions and the most recent previous version of Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Lynx. Adobe Acrobat Reader (the latest version is recommended) also needs to be installed. For viewing Postscript files without a Postscript printer, you’ll also need a Postscript viewer such as GhostScript. RMP knows exactly who its audience is ‐ professional physicists who are already subscribers to the print edition of Reviews of Modern Physics and may like access to an online version ‐ and that’s to whom the articles and the help information are directed. The Reviews of Modern Physics Online is the exact counterpart of the print journal and is available free to subscribers to the print version. The publishing schedules for the print edition and the online edition of RMP are exactly the same. There is no value‐added information on the web site nor is there multimedia content or any kind of animated graphics that would only be possible on the web. Full‐text articles are available from January, 1997 to the present. Citation information is available from 1927 to the present. Forthcoming tables of contents are available approximately two months before the actual publication date. Articles can be displayed in PDF format or printed in Postscript format.
The site is well‐developed but presents some problems, most of which are technical. RMP recommends upgrading to the most current version of your web browser, stating that after January 1, 2000 “some older versions of those browsers will display a security error message when you try to go to certain pages on the RMP site (and other pages on the Internet)” (http://rmp.aps.org/help/ browser.dtl). But upgrading to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.0 causes some of the links at RMP’s site to not work. In order to correct this, you’ll need to download a patch from Microsoft. RMP explains this clearly (and in multiple places on the site) and provides a link to the download site. Even after downloading the patch, I found that I could not always retrieve the full‐text articles; and this was extremely frustrating. After trial and error, I found that if I did a search, I could pull up the articles; however, if I went into the journal archive to browse, none of the links worked. I did not experience this problem with Netscape. The AOL browser does not work well with RMP ‐ possibly because RMP authenticates by IP address and AOL does dynamic IP addressing. When I used my AOL account at work to access RMP, I was asked for a login whereas I was not asked for one with either IE or Netscape. RMP recommends that users download the latest version of Netscape or IE and use that instead of AOL. While this is not uncommon, again it is an inconvenience for users who may have to spend hours downloading the most current version of a browser.
Readers of RMP also need to have Adobe Acrobat installed on their computers. New users of the web may not know where to find the Acrobat Reader so RMP provides a link to the Adobe web site that’s fairly easy to find in their Help screens under Help with Printing. The RMP Help screens explain how to configure Netscape so that it recognizes the Acrobat Reader; but they mention nothing about whether or not Internet Explorer needs to be similarly set up. Having to do this much extra work to read an article makes it tempting to just walk to the library and copy the article instead, negating the value of an online product.
The RMP search engine for the available online journals is quite powerful and allows for inputting a number of different variables. Searching is possible by citation ‐ either exact or partial ‐ (volume and first page), author, exact phrase, words in title or abstract, or words anywhere in the article. The search engine allows the use of the asterisk (*) for truncation; it also recognizes the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and ().
Stemming is employed in RMP searches so that similar terms to the search word will be retrieved; for example a search for “colloid” retrieved “colloidal” as well. This is a feature that can be disabled simply by enclosing each search word in quotation marks. Searches can be limited by date; and the number of results displayed on the screen can be changed through the use of pull‐down menus.
The index for issues that are not available online (1927‐present) does not have all the bells and whistles of the search engine for the online journals. It allows searching by author, title, volume range, and date. Boolean searching cannot be used; but the asterisk as a truncation symbol is allowed. The results are displayed as an html table and provide basic citation information ‐ author, title, volume, page, and year. There are no abstracts. The lack of abstracts for older articles at first struck me as a problem; but physicists, like most other scientists, are usually interested in the most current material; and the Reviews of Modern Physics web site makes full‐text available back to 1997.
The RMP site does not provide any printed documentation; but their online help is very useful and clear. The answers to questions such as, “What if I only know the institution affiliation of the author ‐ how will I find the article?” are answered in the Help with Online Searching section which has a detailed table of contents. Help with problems as diverse as installing Acrobat Reader and filling out the form for IP addresses is available. The answers to most questions a reader is likely to have can be found here; but RMP also provides a link to a feedback form for any question a user may have that cannot be answered using the help screens. The form can either be filled out or another e‐mail address listed at the bottom of the screen can be used to ask questions. There is no phone number, toll‐free or otherwise, to call for technical support or search assistance; but, by using the help screens and the feedback form, if needed, users should be able to find the answers to their questions.
Reviews of Modern Physics benefits professional physicists and possibly engineers and mathematicians. It compares favorably with the Institute of Physics (http://www.iop.org) and with the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org) web sites, both of which have online journals available. The Institute of Physics site, in particular, has very clear and useful help screens; RMP’s help is on a par with those of the IOP. The site is easy to use. Even if you don’t know much about searching, you can always browse the available issues. It is worth the price to academic institutions who already subscribe to RMP. It’s free with the subscription ‐ all a library needs to do is take some time to send in IP addresses.
Since this title is written for an audience of professional physicists (most of whom can be found in academic institutions), RMP is entirely appropriate for any academic institution with a physics program. Colleges that only teach physics as a service course might not want to bother with it; but those with majors or even minors would certainly want to consider it. I would highly recommend the Reviews of Modern Physics web site to those institutions that subscribe to the print journal. Making it available on the web adds another point of access for the faculty and students in physics; and, despite the technical problems mentioned and the extra software to download, RMP is worth the trouble once everything is configured to work correctly.
