The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announces an important change to both the online publication mode and citation format for eight of its archival journals. Effective with the first issues of 2005, eight of AIP’s journals will transition from traditional page numbers to six-character citation identifiers, or CIDs.

Use of CIDs in place of traditional page numbers allows an issue to build online one article at a time, while retaining the ability to segment tables of contents by article type or subject area. The transition to CIDs will further accelerate the publication process for individual articles, which will be published online individually as soon as author proof corrections are incorporated. Utilization of CIDs also allows articles to be fully citable as soon as they are published online, using the same identifier for both print and online versions.

The structure of the six-character citation identifier chosen by AIP for its journals is defined as follows:

An example of the new citation format for a typical paper published in Applied Physics Letters is the following:

A. Smith and B. Jones, Appl. Phys. Lett. 86, 023507 (2005),

where this fictitious paper by Smith and Jones would have been published in Issue 2 of Volume 86, as the seventh article published in the section identified by the two-character code 35. On each journal’s home page will be found prominent links to the definition of the current two-character subject area codes. Section code definitions may change from volume to volume. Code definitions for each volume will be maintained over time on each journal’s home page.

Readers will find that, in the full-text published article (both online PDF and in print), the CID appears on each page. Appended at the end of the CID is a hyphen followed by a consecutive page number. For the sample article above, the printed pages would carry this page numbering: 023507-1, 023507-2, 023507-3, etc. The hyphen and additional digits should not be used when citing or searching for an article.

Online users will find that all the powerful features they currently use on AIP’s Scitation^SM platform will adjust seamlessly back and forth between page numbers (for pre-2005 material) and citation identifiers (for material published in 2005 and after). Searching and document ordering on Scitation will perform as always after the transition to citation identifiers.

In adopting citation identifiers for its journals, AIP acknowledges the ground-breaking work of The American Physical Society and its early adoption of a citation identifier scheme for Physical Review. Though similar in format to the scheme established for Physical Review, AIP’s citation identifiers are not purely numeric as they are for Physical Review. For two of AIP’s journals, Journal of Applied Physics (JAP) and Review of Scientific Instruments (RSI), the CIDs will contain alphanumeric combinations in the middle two characters (of the form A1, A2, A3, etc.) for conference proceedings papers only. For regular papers in JAP and RSI and for all papers in the other six AIP journals, purely numeric CIDs will be used.

Citation identifiers will be added to the AIP journals starting with the issue dates shown below:

Please direct your questions and comments about AIP’s citation identifiers via e-mail to the Office of the Journal Publisher at jrnlpub@aip.org. We hope that the community will benefit from the increased speed of publication and logical display of tables of contents gained by AIP’s adoption of a citation identifier scheme and look forward to hearing from you.