Journal Reviews and Reports

Turpion Electronic Journals
http://www.turpion.org/

Greg Youngen
Physics/Astronomy Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
youngen@uiuc.edu

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Turpion Ltd. was established by the Royal Society of Chemistry, in association with Pion Ltd., to produce English translations of Russian scientific journals in conjunction with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the London Mathematical Society.

Turpion Titles:

Chemistry

Mendeleev Communications

Russian Chemical Reviews (translation of Uspekhi Khimii)

Mathematics

Sbornik: Mathematics (translation of Matematicheskii Sbornik)

Izvestiya: Mathematics (translation of Izvestiya RAN: Seriya Matematicheskaya)

Russian Mathematical Surveys (translation of Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk)

Regular & Chaotic Dynamics

Physics

Quantum Electronics (translation of Kvantovaya Electronika)

Physics-Uspekhi (translation of Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk)

Other Publishers

Perspectives in Energy

Turpion's web site is well designed, easy to use and full of useful information about the journals they publish. It also provides the access point to the web sites of the individual titles. The Turpion site provides links to a search engine, a page for setting up an e-mail table of contents notification service (free), their licensing terms and agreements, and the online registration form for full text access.

Each Turpion journal has its own web page that provides information on the scope of coverage, the current editorial board, and a brief history of the title. All current journals are available electronically in full text with most having tables of contents available electronically from early to mid-1990s. Two titles, Mendeleev Communications and Perspectives in Energy, are not translated journals. Their original articles are published in English. The newest title in the Turpion collection is Regular & Chaotic Dynamics. Turpion is currently offering free electronic access (via password) to two years' worth of this title upon registration through their home page.

The Turpion titles primarily publish articles by Russian authors. Likewise, the majority of their editorial board memberships are from Russian institutions. Their best-known title in physics, Physics Uspekhi, has a respectable ISI impact factor of 1.476 and is one of the very few physics titles with articles achieving a cited half-life of over 10 years. (ISI Journal Citation Report 1998).

The publisher has an up-to-date subscription rate page with prices quoted for annual subscriptions, package plans, and single issues. Several titles provide price breaks for members of the American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry, so read the notes on this page carefully. One of the advantages of the Turpion subscription is an end-of-volume CD-ROM that includes a PDF version of all articles published at no extra charge.

The Turpion web site search feature is slow to load and to return search results. It would probably be faster to use MathSciNet, INSPEC, or Current Contents for known item searches in the Turpion publications. Most of the Turpion journals are covered by these major abstracting and indexing services, but you may want to check the title's web site to be sure.