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Editor-in-Chief Grover Swartzlander summarizes a year of Centennial celebrations and reflects on the long-term value of papers published in the Journal.
© 2017 Optical Society of America
The first issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA) was published 100 years ago—one year after the founding of The Optical Society of America (OSA). We spent last year celebrating the Society’s anniversary via creation of a special Centennial website [1] that hosts commemorative review articles, top-cited papers, collections curated by Centennial Editors Prem Kumar and Bahaa Saleh, and more.
The world has changed in innumerable ways since 1917, and so has the reach and scope of OSA’s publishing enterprise. One invariant, however, is the recognition by OSA members that we all benefit the scientific profession when we support OSA through activities such as publishing a new result, serving as a peer reviewer, or volunteering as an editor for an OSA journal.
As of this writing, JOSA and its two spin-offs, JOSA A and JOSA B, have published roughly 37,500 papers over the 100-year publishing history, with the help of some 400 editors (see them all on the Centennial website [1]). In particular, JOSA B has published around 11,700 papers since JOSA was split into JOSA A and JOSA B in 1984, and, in 2016 alone, the editors consulted over 1000 reviewers. It is truly a community effort.
As an archival journal, JOSA B seeks to publish in-depth discussions that include well-documented bibliographies and reliably edited and reviewed subject matter. Immediate impact has never usurped the long-term value of “complete content.” Evidence of the enduring scientific value of the Journal can be gauged by a metric called the cited half-life, which measures the median age of cited articles. It is calculated annually by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) and included in their Journal Citation Reports. The cited half-life of JOSA B is currently 9.6 years, or almost a decade. This represents a measure of lasting intellectual property value to both authors and readers. What is more, the historical median number of citations per article in JOSA B is 28 citations. Clearly researchers recognize the value of publishing and citing the full-length articles in JOSA B.
Papers that were most highly cited one decade after publication received, on average, 30 citations in the decadal year alone. Many of these authors later received high international honors for their contributions to science. A representative sampling of such papers is listed below. These span the traditional topical scope of the Journal, broadly defined by the interaction of light with matter: Atomic, Molecular, and Quantum Optics [2], Metamaterials [3], Nano-Optics [4], Nonlinear Optics [5,6], Optical Machining [7], Photonics [8], Slow Light [9], Spectroscopy [10], Terahertz Phenomena [11], and Ultrashort Pulses [12].
I look forward to your own contributions to JOSA B in the coming years—may they be as long-lived as these examples. I also invite you to make use of the newly upgraded search tools on the OSA Publishing site to discover some of the classic and enduring papers in your own topic area.
On behalf of the entire JOSA B editorial board and publishing staff, thank you for your contributions as authors, reviewers, and editors over our rich 100-year history. I wish you many successes in the future.
Editor-in-Chief, JOSA B
Rochester Institute of Technology
REFERENCES
1. OSA Centennial Bookshelf, http://www.osa.org/en-us/100/centennial_bookshelf/.
2. J. Dalibard and C. Cohen-Tannoudji, “Laser cooling below the Doppler limit by polarization gradients: simple theoretical models,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6, 2023–2045 (1989). [CrossRef]
3. D. Smith and J. Pendry, “Homogenization of metamaterials by field averaging (invited paper),” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 23, 391–403 (2006). [CrossRef]
4. R. Averitt, S. Westcott, and N. Halas, “Linear optical properties of gold nanoshells,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 16, 1824–1832 (1999). [CrossRef]
5. A. Said, M. Sheik-Bahae, D. Hagan, T. Wei, J. Wang, J. Young, and E. Van Stryland, “Determination of bound-electronic and free-carrier nonlinearities in ZnSe, GaAs, CdTe, and ZnTe,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 9, 405–414 (1992). [CrossRef]
6. L. Myers, R. Eckardt, M. Fejer, R. Byer, W. Bosenberg, and J. Pierce, “Quasi-phase-matched optical parametric oscillators in bulk periodically poled LiNbO3,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12, 2102–2116 (1995). [CrossRef]
7. R. Osellame, S. Taccheo, M. Marangoni, R. Ramponi, P. Laporta, D. Polli, S. De Silvestri, and G. Cerullo, “Femtosecond writing of active optical waveguides with astigmatically shaped beams,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 20, 1559–1567 (2003). [CrossRef]
8. E. Yablonovitch, “Photonic band-gap structures,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 10, 283–295 (1993). [CrossRef]
9. M. Soljačić, S. Johnson, S. Fan, M. Ibanescu, E. Ippen, and J. Joannopoulos, “Photonic-crystal slow-light enhancement of nonlinear phase sensitivity,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 19, 2052–2059 (2002). [CrossRef]
10. J. Ye, L. Ma, and J. Hall, “Ultrasensitive detections in atomic and molecular physics: demonstration in molecular overtone spectroscopy,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 15, 6–15 (1998). [CrossRef]
11. G. Gallot, S. Jamison, R. McGowan, and D. Grischkowsky, “Terahertz waveguides,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 17, 851–863 (2000). [CrossRef]
12. W. Tomlinson, R. Stolen, and C. Shank, “Compression of optical pulses chirped by self-phase modulation in fibers,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1, 139–149 (1984). [CrossRef]