Physics Letters B, Physical Review Letters and arXiv publications. Correlating PLB, PRL and arXiv articles for nuclear, particle and astro-physics

TL;DR

This study correlates articles from Physics Letters B, Physical Review Letters, and arXiv to classify and analyze nuclear, particle, and astrophysics publications over time, revealing gaps and overlaps in preprint and journal records.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extend subject classification of PLB articles to earlier dates by correlating with arXiv and PRL data, and analyzes the existence of preprints prior to journal publication.

Findings

Many PLB articles lack arXiv references.

Correlation with PRL confirms similar patterns over a shorter period.

Preprint versions often exist on arXiv without journal references.

Abstract

When analyzing the content of Physics Letter B (PLB) web pages, one goal was to separate articles from particle physics(HEP) and nuclear physics(NP). PLB contains information about the subject area of an article: Astrophysics and Cosmology, Experiments, Phenomenology or Theory. Those subject areas have been used since 2004. To extend those areas to earlier dates and try to separate HEP and NP publications, the idea was to use the information on the arXiv to accomplish this, by correlating a publication in PLB with a publication in one of the different arXiv repositories for particle, nuclear or astrophysics. The arXiv articles go back to at least 1995. When building the correlation between an arXiv article and each PLB article, it was found that many PLB articles do not have an existing reference in an arXiv article. Given that, the same analysis was performed using particle, nuclear and astro physics publications in Physical Review Letters (PRL). A similar result was obtained, but for a much shorter period of time. Finally, a title match was performed between the two journals and the arXiv, to see whether the preprint version of the journal article existed on the arXiv at all. They do, but without a journal reference.