The mission of the American Journal of Physics (AJP) is to publish articles on the educational and cultural aspects of physics that are useful, interesting, and accessible to a diverse audience of physics students, educators, and researchers who are generally reading outside their specialties to broaden their understanding of physics and to expand and enhance their pedagogical toolkits at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We particularly encourage manuscripts that are directly useful in a classroom or laboratory setting. Please read the Submission Guidelines before submitting a manuscript.

Before submitting a manuscript to AJP, please read this document and also consult the Statement of Editorial Policy.

Authors are expected to perform a thorough literature search before submitting a manuscript. It is particularly easy to search AJP using the search function at AJP Online. Most other journals have similar facilities. Manuscripts with clearly inadequate references will be returned without review.

To be publishable in AJP, a manuscript should be evidently written for and useful, interesting, and accessible to physicists from outside the specific subdiscipline that is the subject of the manuscript.

Technical correctness is a necessary, but entirely insufficient criterion for acceptance. Other expectations include clarity of presentation and a significant level of general interest to AJP's diverse audience. Authors should ask a colleague to read and critique their manuscripts before submission. Authors whose native language is not English should have someone with an excellent command of written English read their manuscript and help them with revisions to improve the grammar and usage.

Criteria that will be used in evaluating the appropriateness of submitted manuscripts include the following:

• Would it be of value to undergraduate or graduate teachers or students of physics? (This criterion does not mean that the content needs to be immediately applicable in the classroom — the benefit may be, and often is indirect. Nevertheless, the educational motivation of the manuscript should be evident and unstrained.)
• Would it aid significantly in the process of learning physics?
• Does it provide enough background information to be accessible to readers from other subdisciplines of physics?
• Does it describe new ways of understanding, demonstrating, describing or teaching physics?
• Does it take proper cognizance of previous work on the same subject, regardless of where it may have appeared?
• Is it well organized and written in a clear and interesting manner?
• Especially for more theoretical/mathematical manuscripts: Is the presentation clearly motivated by application to physical phenomena and does it provide significant insight about the phenomena?
• Especially for manuscripts significantly longer than our average of 4000 to 5000 words: Is the length justified by the value of the contents?

Manuscripts that are not acceptable include but are not limited to the following:

• Those announcing new theories or experimental results that should be evaluated by specialized research journals. See the Statement of Editorial Policy for clarification.
• Those that seem to have been written for research journals.
• Those that merely solve a textbook type problem.
• Those that provide a detailed calculation with little or no physical insight.
• Those that provide an alternative derivation of a standard result, without providing significant new insight, a significantly new way of thinking, or a much simpler approach.
• Those that have very limited interest.

JOIN AAPT:

The American Journal of Physics is a publication of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). Authors who submit manuscripts and are not members of AAPT are strongly encouraged to join the Association to receive personal access to AAPT's journals. In addition to various other professional benefits of membership, the collective support of members enhance the high quality of AJP content that is recognized the world over. Special rates are available for international members.