Reports on Progress in Physics

About Reports on Progress in Physics

Overview

Reports on Progress in Physics (commonly abbreviated Rep. Prog. Phys. and known to most physicists simply as ROPP) is one of the most distinguished and long-running journals in the physical sciences. Published by IOP Publishing in the United Kingdom on a monthly basis, the journal has served the global physics community since 1934. For the first nine decades of its existence, it built its reputation almost entirely as a reviews journal — the place where the mature, settled story of a major area of physics was told, in depth, by leading authorities, for the benefit of the entire field. Then, in its 90th anniversary year of 2024, ROPP began a historic new chapter: it started publishing original research papers of the highest significance alongside its traditional reviews.

Today the journal's stated mission is to publish ground-breaking original research and authoritative reviews of the very highest quality and significance across all areas of physics and related disciplines. It is the flagship journal of IOP Publishing's portfolio and sits within the publisher's "Progress In" family of journals. Editorial leadership currently rests with Editor-in-Chief Subir Sachdev of Harvard University, supported in day-to-day operation by Chief Editor Dr David Gevaux. The journal carries print ISSN 0034-4885 and online ISSN 1361-6633, and is identified by the CODEN RPPHAG.

Journal at a Glance

History: Nine Decades of Service to Physics

The story of Reports on Progress in Physics begins with the Physical Society of London. According to the official history of the Institute of Physics, the Society produced Reports on Progress in Physics as an annual publication that first appeared in 1934. Its original purpose was straightforward and civic-minded: to keep physicists informed about progress across the full breadth of the discipline — a kind of annual state-of-the-field digest at a time when physics itself was being remade by quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

Over the decades, ROPP evolved from that annual digest into a monthly, highly selective reviews journal. Its format became familiar to generations of physicists: an invited expert (or team of experts) would survey a topic that had reached a mature stage of development, distil the key results, critique the evidence, and point to where the field should go next. Because the introductions were written for a broad readership beyond the narrow specialist, these reviews became teaching instruments — the canonical entry points into entire research areas. Over its first nine decades, ROPP published more than 2,500 review papers, and more than 20 of them were written by Nobel laureates.

In 2024 the journal celebrated its 90th anniversary with a two-day celebration, an event covered by Physics World, IOP Publishing's own flagship magazine. The anniversary was not merely a backward-looking celebration: the publisher used it to announce the most significant change in the journal's editorial policy in its history. Beginning in 2024, ROPP started accepting original research articles — papers containing new scientific findings — for the first time. The plan, as announced by IOP Publishing, was to publish 150 to 200 very-high-quality primary-research papers each year, in addition to the customary output of around 50 review papers, most of which continue to be commissioned by the journal's active editorial board. The stated goal was to cement the journal's place at the pinnacle of the publisher's portfolio while keeping the reviews tradition that made it famous.

Scope and Article Types

Reports on Progress in Physics describes itself as a highly selective, multidisciplinary journal, and its subject coverage is deliberately broad. The journal covers all areas of physics and related interdisciplinary areas, explicitly including:

• Condensed matter physics
• Atomic and molecular physics
• Quantum science and quantum technology
• Computational physics
• Chemical physics
• Biophysics
• Photonics
• Nuclear and particle physics
• Astrophysics and cosmology

Three principal article formats are available to authors:

• Review articles — the traditional, full-length authoritative review that surveys and critiques a topic or development in a field. Reviews in ROPP have historically aimed at presenting the mature development of an area that has produced significant advances of wide interest to physics and neighboring disciplines.
• Reports on Progress — a mid-length format of roughly 20 pages, suited to timely accounts of developing areas.
• Key Issues Reviews — a shorter format of roughly 10 pages, focused on critical issues or emerging topics.

Since 2024, a fourth category has joined the list: original research articles of broad, multidisciplinary interest, selected with the expectation of long-term scientific impact and of influencing the current state or future direction of a field. ROPP emphasizes that introductions should remain accessible to a broad readership — the journal is written for physicists in general, not only for the handful of specialists working on the narrow topic at hand.

The 2024 Expansion into Original Research

The move into primary research was launched with visible fanfare. The first four original research articles published in the expanded journal were:

• "Extracting the speed of sound in quark-gluon plasma with ultra-relativistic lead-lead collisions at the LHC"
• "Symmetry-preserving quadratic Lindbladian and dissipation driven topological transitions in Gaussian states"
• "Divergence beneath the Brillouin sphere and the phenomenology of prediction error in spherical harmonic series approximations of the gravitational field"
• "A statistical primer on classical period-finding techniques in astronomy"

The mix is deliberate: heavy-ion physics, open quantum systems, gravitational theory, and astro-statistics — a snapshot of the journal's intended multidisciplinary reach. In the editorial accompanying the launch, Chief Editor Dr David Gevaux set out the rationale for repositioning the journal while preserving its reviews heritage. Editor-in-Chief Subir Sachdev stated that the quality and coverage of these first papers reinforced ROPP's long-standing reputation as one of the most important resources for physicists at all career stages. Because IOP Publishing is a learned-society publisher with no shareholders — all surpluses flow back into the Institute of Physics to support the physics community — the journal frames itself as having the international physics community at its heart, in contrast to journals owned by commercial publishers.

Editorial Leadership

The editorial board is led by Professor Subir Sachdev of Harvard University in the United States, who serves as Editor-in-Chief. Sachdev is a widely cited theoretical physicist known for work on quantum phase transitions and strongly correlated systems. Day-to-day journal operations are overseen by Chief Editor Dr David Gevaux, who has represented the journal publicly in the announcement of the 2024 expansion and the 90th-anniversary coverage. Earlier in the journal's history, editorial leadership included physicists such as Gordon Baym of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (listed as editor-in-chief in mid-2010s sources). The journal maintains an active editorial board that continues to commission most of the review content it publishes — ROPP reviews are largely by invitation.

Journal Metrics and Standing

Reports on Progress in Physics is consistently ranked among the leading physics review journals. The following metrics are drawn from the journal's official IOPscience journal page, which is the authoritative source:

A note on metric reporting: third-party aggregator sites sometimes display different or older values for this journal (for example, some list historical impact factors such as 20.7 for 2024, 19.0 for 2023, or 18.1 for 2022, and varying CiteScore figures). Impact factors are calculated by Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports and change with each annual release; readers should always consult the current official listing on the IOPscience journal page or Clarivate directly for the latest figure. The journal's acceptance rate is not officially published — IOP Publishing does not release a journal-specific acceptance rate for ROPP, so no reliable figure can be stated here.

ROPP's standing also rests on softer but equally real indicators: it is ranked in the top quartile (Q1) of physics and astronomy journals in citation databases, it has published more than 2,500 reviews across nine decades, and its articles routinely accumulate hundreds of citations apiece — the classic signature of a successful review journal, where a single authoritative review can become the standard citation for an entire field.

Open Access Policy and Article Publication Charges

Reports on Progress in Physics is a hybrid journal: it operates on a subscription basis but offers authors an open access (OA) option under a Creative Commons license (IOP Publishing publishes OA articles under CC BY 4.0). The following elements of the journal's OA policy are officially documented by IOP Publishing:

• OA option available — authors may choose to publish their accepted article open access.
• Free OA for authors in low and lower-middle-income countries — researchers based in eligible low-income and lower-middle-income economies have their article publication charges covered, enabling OA at no cost. In March 2026 IOP Publishing expanded this into a three-tier discount structure across 122 economies: 100% waiver for eligible low-income economies, 70% for eligible lower-middle-income economies, and 30% for eligible upper-middle-income economies.
• Transformative agreements — ROPP is included in IOP Publishing's programme of transformative (read-and-publish) agreements, which the publisher reports now cover more than 1,000 universities and research institutions worldwide. Corresponding authors at participating institutions can publish OA at no direct cost to themselves.
• Automatic waivers — as with the rest of IOP Publishing's hybrid and OA journals, waivers for eligible authors are applied automatically.

The exact article publication charge (APC) in dollars or pounds for this specific journal is not officially published on the journal's public page, so no journal-specific APC figure is stated in this profile. Industry-wide studies of 2025 list prices have placed IOP Publishing's median hybrid APC around US$3,330, but that is a publisher-wide median, not the price for ROPP specifically; authors should confirm the current charge on the journal's official submission page before submitting.

Indexing and Visibility

ROPP is indexed in the major scholarly databases, which is one of the foundations of its citation performance. Standard indexing records for the journal include:

• Scopus
• Web of Science (Clarivate — the source of the journal's impact factor)
• Inspec
• Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)
• ADS (Astrophysics Data System) for relevant content
• PubMed/MEDLINE and related biomedical indexes for relevant content

Bibliographic identifiers: LCCN 35016768, OCLC 1607643. All articles receive DOIs under the 10.1088 prefix and are hosted on the IOPscience platform, with research highlights also promoted through Physics World.

Landmark and Notable Articles

What makes ROPP historically significant is not just its longevity but who has written for it. Physics World's 90th-anniversary coverage notes that more than 20 articles by Nobel Prize-winning physicists have appeared in the journal's pages. Figures named in the anniversary coverage include:

• Hans Bethe — on stellar evolution
• Lawrence Bragg — on protein crystallography
• Abdus Salam — on field theory
• Konstantin Novoselov — on 2D materials (graphene)
• Ferenc Krausz — on attosecond physics
• Isamu Akasaki — on blue LEDs

This lineage — from Bethe and Bragg to contemporary laureates — is exactly what the journal means when it describes reviews that "capture and represent nearly a century's worth of landmark developments across the physical sciences." For a researcher deciding where to send a major review, that archive is the journal's strongest credential: ROPP reviews have historically defined how entire generations of physicists learn a field.

Publishing in ROPP: What Authors Should Know

• Commissioned content: Most review articles are commissioned by the editorial board. If you are a leading expert in an area that has reached a mature, reviewable stage, you can propose a review — but unsolicited proposals face a highly selective filter.
• Original research: Since 2024, the journal also considers original research papers of broad, multidisciplinary interest, expected to have long-term impact and to influence the direction of a field. Selectivity is extreme: the target is only 150–200 such papers per year.
• Audience: Write the introduction for a broad physics readership, not only for specialists in your subfield. Accessible framing is an editorial requirement, not a suggestion.
• Speed: The official journal page reports a median of 4 days from submission to first decision before peer review (i.e., the desk-rejection/triage stage is fast) and 46 days to first decision after peer review.
• Open access: Decide at submission whether to take the OA option; check whether your institution's transformative agreement with IOP Publishing covers the charge, and whether you qualify for a geographic waiver.
• Data and reproducibility: Authors are encouraged to share data and code where appropriate, and the journal offers double-anonymous and transparent peer-review options.

Strengths and Considerations

Strengths. ROPP combines three rare assets: a nine-decade archive of authoritative reviews, a Nobel-studded author list, and (since 2024) a new home for landmark original research — all under a learned-society publisher whose surpluses support the physics community. Its multidisciplinary scope makes a single review relevant across subfields, which drives its high citation impact, and its fast triage (4-day median) respects authors' time.

Considerations. Selectivity is the trade-off: with only around 50 reviews and 150–200 original papers per year planned, acceptance is far from assured, and the journal does not publish an official acceptance rate. Researchers seeking rapid, high-volume publication should look elsewhere. The exact APC is not publicly itemized on the journal page, so budgeting requires direct confirmation with the publisher.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Reports on Progress in Physics a review journal or a research journal?

Historically it has been a review journal — that is its identity and its reputation. Since 2024, however, it also publishes original research articles of broad multidisciplinary interest alongside its commissioned reviews. Think of it as a hybrid: reviews remain the core, original research is the new, highly selective addition.

Who publishes Reports on Progress in Physics?

IOP Publishing, the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics (IOP), a UK-based learned society. IOP Publishing is not a commercial publisher with shareholders; its surpluses are reinvested in the Institute of Physics to support the physics community.

What are the ISSNs of Reports on Progress in Physics?

Print ISSN 0034-4885 and online ISSN 1361-6633, both confirmed on the journal's official IOPscience page.

When was Reports on Progress in Physics founded?

1934. It began as an annual publication of the Physical Society and celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2024.

Who is the Editor-in-Chief?

Professor Subir Sachdev of Harvard University (USA). Dr David Gevaux serves as Chief Editor.

What is the impact factor of Reports on Progress in Physics?

The journal's official IOPscience page currently displays an impact factor of 15.4. Because impact factors are recalculated annually by Clarivate, readers should check the current figure on the official page or in Journal Citation Reports.

Is the journal open access?

It is a hybrid journal: subscription-based with an open access option (CC BY 4.0). Free OA is available to authors in eligible low and lower-middle-income countries, and the journal participates in IOP Publishing's transformative agreements covering more than 1,000 institutions.

How fast is the review process?

The official journal page reports a median of 4 days from submission to first decision before peer review, and 46 days after peer review.

Where can I read ROPP articles?

On the IOPscience platform at iopscience.iop.org/journal/0034-4885, and through institutional library access. Open access articles are freely available to everyone, and research highlights are summarized on Physics World.