The sixtieth anniversary edition of the Review of Particle Physics has been published in the American Physical Society (APS) journal Physical Review D (PRD). The Review is an evaluation of the properties of all the known elementary particles and of searches for new hypothetical ones. In 118 review articles, it summarises the latest information on particle physics and related areas such as cosmology.
In 1957, physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Arthur H. Rosenfeld published a paper that reviewed theory and experiments involving particles known as hyperons and heavy mesons. The paper was associated with an unpublished technical report listing the data associated with all the elementary particles known at that time. Meanwhile, Matts Roos of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics was compiling his own list of particle data. In 1964 the two publications merged. Over the course of sixty years, the Review has grown from a few dozen pages to nearly two-thousand, with 227 authors adding new data from 758 papers reporting 2,783 measurements for the 2018 edition.
The Review has been published in a variety of leading physics journals in the US, Europe, and China. The publication this year in the journal Physical Review D is the 20th time the Review has appeared in a journal of the APS.
The most recent, complete edition is available online in Physical Review D and through the PDG website. However, the PDG Book, which contains the Summary Tables and all of the full review articles, and a 260-page PDG Booklet will be available in print.
In total, the Review of Particle Physics includes 41,371 measurements. Frequent references to the data in its pages ensure that the Review is the most cited physics publication in the world, with more than two-thousand citations annually.
