From the Editor

One of the New Year's resolutions tha t we are determined to make this year is to write our editorials more promptly. I t seems tha t they are invariably composed the night before the final deadline. Few of the editors of the standard journals write editorials but we feel tha t it is just about the only prerogative of an editor and we are determined at least to make an effort. One or two editors use this page for miscellaneous announcements. In Applied Optics we prefer to treat such material as fillers, or perhaps to include it in the Of Optics and Opticists column. Some other editors, such as those of Science or Missiles and Rockets, seem more willing to tackle controversial subjects, and, in particular, enjoy lambasting the scientific policies of the Federal Government. This particular editor grew up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and has always preferred tepid water to hot water, so tha t we would rather not get quite tha t controversial. An espousal of the metric system every other month or so is controversial enough for our languid spleen. Besides, this particular editor works for the Federal Government, and his benevolent employer even reads these editorials, so caution is the watchword. The only worry we are willing to concede here about the Federal Government concerns the ac­tivities of Rep. George Miller (D., Cal.) in behalf of legislation to adopt the metric system. Suppose he succeeded; what would be left to write about?

Let us turn this month to our folder of letters from readers concerning some random topics. We have discussed our referee-ing process now in several editorials. We have recently made a significant improvement in this process: the Publications Board of the American Insti tute of Physics obtained from each editor a copy of all of the standard letters that the editor sends to readers and referees along with a manuscript for review. AIP then compiled this material and sent a set to each editor. I t is very instructive to read the letters and check lists of other editors, and we have now revised our own check list to include many additional points tha t had not previously occurred to us. For example, we had not considered it necessary to include such a question as "Do you know of anyone who should see the manu­script before it is published (to permit comment or rebuttal)?" However, we have now suffered through three or four unpleasant­nesses tha t could perhaps have been avoided if we had elicited such information prior to publication. In an effort to improve the abstracts of our articles we now explicitly ask our reviewers to consider the adequacy of the abstract. We also ask the author whether he feels tha t his abstract could appear verbatim in such journals as Physics Abstracts. We are also trying to improve the titles of our articles. The present philosophy is that, if possible, the title should contain some of the key words under which the article would be cross-indexed in a subject index.

Perhaps this is the proper place to salute the heroic activities of F . S. Harris, Jr., of the Aerospace Corporation, who compiles our index. For over two years now he has scanned each article for the key words of the cross-index. To assist him in this ac­tivity we now send to each author an "Aid to Indexing" form de­signed by AIP, in which we also ask the author himself under what key words he would expect to find his own article if he were look­ing it up in Physics Abstracts. Even this, however, is only the author's opinion, and it often requires an impersonal opinion of the headings under which an article could most usefully be in­dexed. The ultimate goal is to obtain a subject index that could be combined with those of the other physics journals in a master index suitable for information retrieval purposes. Test us: take any article from our last year a t random, read it, and decide

where you would have listed it in an index. Now look it up in the subject index of our December 1963 issue. We think you will be as impressed as we are and as grateful that we have a Frank Harris among us. The value of a subject index increases as time passes; most of us are adequately aware of the contents of a current issue. I t is when we try to rediscover something that we vaguely recall from a few years ago that we appreciate the value of a good index.

We should also comment on the splendid work for our journal of Charles Shepard and his panel of patent reviewers. We have heard nothing but praise for this column of patent abstracts. I t is real work to read and to digest a U.S. patent on an optical con­cept into a summary form useful to our readers, and we are deeply grateful to all of the reviewers who have served as patents panelists.

Some readers who have commented on the usefulness of this department in summarizing recent patents in optics have said tha t we should have a similar department reviewing the technical report literature. This would be a much more complicated matter than reviewing patents: the reports originate from a variety of sources, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep aware of which groups are active and for which sponsors. Our present ap­proach to this problem is to urge those workers writing technical reports for NSF, NASA, DOD, etc., to write a Letter to the Editor for publication in our journal whenever they have accumulated sufficient material suitable for publication. If any of you has a bright idea on how such a department could be organized please let us know.

We have a letter from one reader with the following suggestion: "Inasmuch as each number of Applied Optics deals largely with a single subject, the name of the subject should be printed along the bound edge of the journal. In some cases this would permit more rapid access to the correct number for those who do not have individual numbers bound in a single volume". We will give some thought to this; the old Proc. IRE (now Proc. IEEE) did not mind saying "Infrared Issue" on the bound edge; per­haps we could also do this. We notice that the National Geographic has also recently begun this notation on the spine.

We have had several letters from authors wondering when their long-lost manuscripts would finally appear. If you have ob­served the last two or three issues you will see tha t we have now worked our publication time down to less than nine months for articles. We did this by having 150-page issues until the backlog was whittled down. Now we will drop back to our normal size. We alternate between fits of gloom about what to do about im­possible backlogs and periods of despondency tha t we have frightened off all our authors and soon will not have enough papers to publish. Hurry, send in a paper today to cheer us up ; we would rather be gloomy than despondent.

For those in great anxiety about expediency we would like to point out tha t our Letters to the Editor are moving rapidly: they average between two and four months, depending on the amount of change requested by referees. We think this is a reasonably respectable speed of publication. Some journals may be faster but in optics, even in Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads Applied Optics.

JOHN N. HOWARD

SEPTEMBER 1962 ISSUES

If any readers have a copy of this issue which they do not require, the Managing Editor would be grateful if they would send it to her. Postage and any other costs will be refunded. Room 101,1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

384 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 3, No. 3 / March 1964