Physical Review Applied

About Physical Review Applied

Journal Overview

Physical Review Applied (standard abbreviation Phys. Rev. Appl.) is a monthly, peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the whole of applied physics, published by the American Physical Society (APS) of the United States. It is a member of the Physical Review family of journals, the suite of titles APS has published since 1893. The journal positions itself as "a trusted and multidisciplinary journal for high-quality, significant developments in applied science," publishing work at the interfaces of physics with engineering, materials science, chemistry, biology, and medicine.

The journal is identified by online ISSN 2331-7019 and CD-ROM ISSN 2331-7043, with the CODEN PRAHB2 (LCCN 2013203872; OCLC 861358736). It is published electronically, one article at a time, on a rolling basis; articles are identified by volume number and a six-digit article number (for example, Phys. Rev. Applied 2, 034007 (2014)), with volumes aggregated monthly. It operates as a hybrid open-access journal: the default route is subscription access, but authors may pay an article publication charge (APC) to make their accepted manuscript immediately and freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Physical Review Applied is abstracted and indexed in the major scientific databases. Its own APS journal page lists indexing in the ISI Science Citation Index, Scopus, Inspec, and Google Scholar; aggregator profiles additionally record indexing in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and UGC CARE. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal's 2025 impact factor is 4.4. The journal maintains an active social-media presence, including the X (Twitter) account @PhysRevApplied.

History of the Journal

Physical Review Applied was launched by the American Physical Society in 2014, at a time when APS was broadening its journal family beyond its long-established disciplinary titles. It followed the 2011 launch of Physical Review X (APS's first fully open-access journal) and answered a widely felt need for a dedicated, high-quality Physical Review venue for physics with clear applications — work that sits at the interface of fundamental physics and engineering.

The journal's first editor was Troy Shinbrot, a physicist at Rutgers University known for his work on granular and complex fluids, who was appointed to lead the new title in 2013, ahead of its first volume. Shinbrot steered the journal through its launch years, establishing its identity as a venue for rigorous applied research that would nonetheless meet the selectivity standards of the Physical Review family.

The launch editorial direction set the journal apart from both generalist physics titles and purely engineering journals: submissions had to present fresh insight into applications-based physical phenomena, make a significant contribution in a specific research area, and represent an authoritative, substantive addition to the literature. Over the following decade the journal grew steadily. By 2026, OpenAlex indexes more than 9,300 works published in Physical Review Applied, which together have accumulated over 200,000 citations — evidence of the journal's rapid establishment as a central venue for applied physics research. The journal's current editor-in-chief is Matthew (Matt) D. Eager.

A notable institutional milestone in the journal's history was the publication of special-issue collections, including a memorial issue honoring Mildred Dresselhaus, the MIT physicist and longtime PRApplied editorial board member whose pioneering work on carbon nanomaterials shaped modern condensed-matter physics. The journal also built an unusually strong visibility apparatus for an applied-physics title: every paper is published online with a short description and key image, video multimedia is accepted alongside articles, and the Editors' Suggestions program — whose highlighted papers the journal reports earn more downloads, citations, and press coverage than average — gives standout work a second wave of attention.

Leadership and Editorial Team

Physical Review Applied is currently led by Editor-in-Chief Matthew D. Eager. He succeeded the journal's founding editor, Troy Shinbrot of Rutgers University, who was appointed in 2013 to establish the title and led it through its formative years.

According to the journal's official APS page, PRApplied is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are made on the basis of the journal's published acceptance criteria. The journal is further guided by a PRApplied Editorial Board — described as a diverse, global group of active, distinguished scientists, selected by the editors and appointed by the APS Executive Editor. Board members serve three-year terms and advise the editorial staff on matters including standards of review, formal appeals of editorial decisions, and other publication matters.

As with all APS journals, the editorial operation is embedded in the American Physical Society's broader publishing structure, and the journal follows APS's common Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover editorial oversight and decision making, authorship, submissions and transfers, peer review, ethics and research integrity, post-publication matters, and open access and publication rights.

Aims & Scope

Physical Review Applied aims to be "a welcoming hub for work from diverse communities in physics and beyond," in the words of its official APS page. The editors explicitly encourage applied researchers in engineering, materials science, chemistry, biology, and medicine to consider the journal their home for stimulating, scholarly publication and discussion. Like all journals in the Physical Review family, it is "shaped by researchers to serve the research community" — a commitment APS reinforces through its founding membership of the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition.

The journal's published scope topics include:

• Biophysics, bioelectronics, and biomedical engineering
• Device physics and electronics
• Energy — technology to harvest, store, and transmit energy, with an emphasis on renewable energy
• Magnetism and spintronics
• Metamaterials and microfluidics
• Nanoscience and nanotechnology
• Optics, optoelectronics, photonics, and photonic devices
• Quantum information science and technology

Submitted manuscripts are expected to meet three acceptance criteria stated on the journal's official page: (1) present fresh insight into applications-based physical phenomena; (2) make a high-quality, significant contribution in a specific research area and generate interest among the journal's readers; and (3) represent an authoritative and substantive addition to the body of literature. The journal thus sits deliberately at the boundary between fundamental physics and engineering application — more applied than Physical Review B or Physical Review Letters, but held to the same standards of rigor.

Article Types and Peer Review

PRApplied publishes four principal article types, as described on its official page:

• Research Articles — traditional full-length reports of original research.
• Letters — short contributions of particular significance or topical interest. The Letters section is intended for accelerated publication of important new results, "at approximately the level of Physical Review Letters." Letters receive priority in editorial processing and production to reduce processing time.
• Review Articles — articles that survey the literature in a field.
• Perspectives — pieces offering opinion and direction at the cutting edge of research.

Manuscripts are evaluated under APS's common Editorial Policies and Practices. Editors may accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts reporting particularly important or groundbreaking research, and formal appeals of editorial decisions are handled with the involvement of the editorial board. Every newly published paper is accompanied online by a short description (a "teaser") and a key image to increase visibility, and the journal accepts video multimedia files for online publication alongside articles.

Outstanding work is further highlighted through several mechanisms: selected papers are chosen as Editors' Suggestions, which the journal notes garner, on average, more downloads and citations than other papers and are more frequently covered by news outlets; editors regularly notify Physics, APS's daily online news and commentary publication, about important papers, resulting in coverage as a Synopsis, Focus, or Viewpoint; and APS promotes press-worthy papers to journalists through a weekly tip sheet, producing frequent coverage in outlets such as Physics World.

Open Access and Publication Charges

Physical Review Applied is a hybrid journal. Authors can pay an article publication charge to make their accepted manuscript immediately accessible under a CC BY 4.0 International license — the most permissive Creative Commons license, which permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. According to APS's official open-access fee schedule, the 2026 APC for gold open access in Physical Review Applied is $2,910 USD. Fees are covered centrally for authors publishing under APS institutional open-access agreements or SCOAP3, and do not apply to editorials, comments, or corrections.

Beyond the hybrid option, APS maintains several access programs documented on the journal's page: APS makes its journals free to read at U.S. public libraries and high schools by application; it is a founding member of CHORUS, which enables distributed public access to published research reporting on U.S. federal government-funded research; authors from lower-income countries are automatically offered APC waivers for all hybrid and gold open-access titles; and free access to subscription content is provided to readers in lower-income countries through partnerships with Research4Life and other programs.

Impact and Metrics

The table below collects the journal's principal metrics, each attributed to its source. Impact factors change with each annual Journal Citation Reports release; the widely cited figure of 4.4 is the 2025 value.

The journal sits in the first quartile of the applied-physics category across both Web of Science and Scopus-derived rankings, and its per-paper citation performance has made it one of the leading dedicated applied-physics journals in the Physical Review family.

Landmark and Highly Cited Papers

The following are among the most-cited papers ever published in Physical Review Applied, ranked by citations in OpenAlex as of October 2026. Each DOI was individually verified against Crossref before inclusion.

* Citation counts are approximate OpenAlex totals as of October 2026 and will have changed since.

These papers illustrate the journal's characteristic breadth. The Stranks et al. perovskite study — the journal's single most-cited paper — helped define the photophysics of the organic-inorganic perovskites that drove the solar-cell efficiency revolution of the 2010s. The Caloz–Alù–Tretyakov review of electromagnetic nonreciprocity and the Ra’di–Simovski–Tretyakov paper on perfect absorbers anchor the journal's strong metamaterials and photonics coverage, while the Goryachev et al. cavity-magnonics paper opened a line of research in hybrid quantum systems that has grown into a major subfield.

Research Themes and Coverage

The journal's citation record reveals where it has made its deepest mark. Energy materials and photovoltaics form the strongest cluster: alongside the Stranks perovskite paper and the Yao et al. study of voltage losses in solution-processable solar cells, the journal has published extensively on organic and perovskite photovoltaics, battery materials, and thermoelectrics. Photonics, metamaterials, and wave physics form a second pillar, exemplified by the nonreciprocity review and the perfect-absorber paper, along with work on metasurfaces, plasmonics, and photonic devices. A third strand is quantum science and technology — cavity magnonics, superconducting circuits, spin qubits, and quantum sensing — reflecting the journal's early bet that applied physics would be central to the quantum-technology revolution. Rounding out the coverage are biophysics and biomedical engineering (including microfluidics and bioelectronics), magnetism and spintronics, and nanoscale devices and electronics. This thematic mix is exactly what the journal's scope promises: physics pursued with an eye on the device, the instrument, and the application.

Submission Guidelines

The following is a summary of the journal's official guidance; authors should always consult the current APS author pages before preparing a manuscript, as details can change.

• Where to submit: manuscripts are submitted through the APS online submission system linked from the journal's official homepage at journals.aps.org/prapplied.
• Scope fit: the single most common reason for desk rejection is lack of fit with the journal's applied-physics remit. Authors should frame their work around applications-based physical phenomena and make the significance for the journal's readership explicit in the cover letter and introduction.
• Article format: choose the article type carefully — Letters for short, urgent results of exceptional significance; Research Articles for complete studies; Review Articles for literature surveys; Perspectives for forward-looking opinion.
• Ethics and integrity: the journal follows APS's common Editorial Policies and Practices, covering authorship standards, conflicts of interest, duplicate submission, and research ethics. All authors must disclose funding sources and potential conflicts.
• Open-access choice: authors may select the gold open-access route (CC BY 4.0, $2,910 APC in 2026) or publish under the subscription model; institutional agreements may cover the APC centrally.
• Data and reproducibility: APS encourages data availability statements and the deposition of supporting data, consistent with its open-science commitments.

Manuscripts that survive initial editorial screening are sent for external peer review by experts selected by the editors; authors of rejected manuscripts may appeal through the formal process involving the editorial board. For exceptionally important results, authors may request consideration for accelerated review, though this is granted only to a small number of manuscripts.

Who Should Read and Publish Here

Physical Review Applied is written for applied physicists, device engineers, materials scientists, and researchers in neighboring disciplines whose work turns physical insight into technology. Its typical reader works on problems such as improving solar-cell efficiency, designing photonic and phononic devices, building quantum-information hardware, engineering spintronic memory, or applying microfluidics to biology and medicine.

For authors, the journal offers the credibility of the Physical Review brand combined with a scope that welcomes application-driven work that might sit awkwardly in a purely fundamental journal. Its Letters section provides a fast track comparable in ambition to Physical Review Letters but dedicated to applied results, while the Editors' Suggestions program and coverage in APS's Physics magazine give standout papers visibility well beyond the journal's regular readership. The hybrid model lets authors choose between traditional subscription publication and immediate gold open access with a CC BY license.

Profile researched October 2026 from the journal's official APS pages, the APS open-access fee schedule, OpenAlex, Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals, SCImago-derived aggregators, and the journal's Wikipedia profile. Metric values are attributed to their sources and data years in the text.