Go-To Particle Physics Reference Hits 100,000 Citations
In their quest to understand what matter is made of and how its constituents behave, decay, and transform, particle physicists carry out vast numbers of experiments at increasingly powerful accelerators and non-accelerator facilities worldwide. The detailed results of these experiments, and their associated theoretical insights, are published in hundreds of scientific papers annually, and new results become available every day. To evaluate this deluge of scientific results, the Particle Data Group (PDG) publishes the Review of Particle Physics, a concise summary of particle physics and related areas of cosmology and astrophysics that includes experimental data and its corresponding theoretical foundations.
The 2024 edition of the Review of Particle Physics was recently released online on the PDG website and interactively on pdgLive, and will be published in August in the journal Physical Review D. The PDG’s main website is visited by over 22K unique visitors each month. The Review of Particle Physics is published in a scientific journal every other year, and each new edition eventually becomes one of the most-cited articles in the field. Now in its 67th year in publication as the primary source of current data and up-to-date reviews for the particle physics community, the Review of Particle Physics marked its 100K citations milestone earlier this month.
With the 2024 edition, a new PDG API is now officially available. This API (application programming interface) provides programmatic access to the data published in the Summary Tables, and the data from the Particle Listings will be added to the API later this year. The API consists of three tools. For most users, the easiest and most versatile method for programmatically accessing PDG data will be via the high-level Python API implemented in the Python package pdg. A REST API allows for the retrieval of the data from pdgLive in JSON format without installing any PDG-specific software. Finally, for those who wish to incorporate PDG data into their own software for an application where the Python API is not suitable, PDG database files containing the PDG data as a single file in SQLite format are available.
The PDG’s history to date is a fascinating journey through an age of unique breakthroughs in physics and computing. Originating in a paper in the 1957 Annual Review of Nuclear Science by authors Art Rosenfeld and Murray Gell-Mann, the PDG has since grown into an international collaboration of 240 authors from 173 institutions in 25 countries. Berkeley Lab leads this effort with a small team that provides the scientific leadership, technical expertise, and computing infrastructure to organize and coordinate all aspects of the information-gathering, data evaluation, and publication process. In 2021, the DOE Office of Science recognized the PDG as an authoritative open-access Public Reusable Research (PuRe) Data resource for the particle physics community. The publication of the Review of Particle Physics is supported by US DOE, MEXT (Japan), INFN (Italy), and CERN.
