A nice piece of news in my mailbox today: it appears that the CMS collaboration, the experiment I work for at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, has got four different scientific papers approved for publication in the course of the same week. What is more, the four articles will be published on three different international magazines of clear authority. A true success !
That CMS is publishing scientific papers at a very high rate was no mystery to me - I spend a good fraction of my research time reviewing those papers (mainly to check for the correctess of the statistical claims they contain, but also occasionally indulging in more substantial requests for clarification or improvement). But four papers accepted for publication in a single week is indeed uncommon, even for such a prolific scientific experiment.
Here are the four papers, and the magazine they will appear in:
- On Physics Letters B, CMS got two papers accepted (a search for microscopic black holes, and a search for W' bosons);
- on Physical Review Letters, one paper (a measurement of B-meson cross sections), and
- on JHEP a fourth paper.
Congratulations to my colleagues for this wonderful achievement.
On a second thought, my penchant for statistics forces me to note here that if a collaboration publishes of the order of one paper per week (such as CMS is more or less doing), the probability that at least four of them get accepted in the same week is not at all negligible. I leave it as an exercise for Lubos to determine the analytical formula for the probability that at least one week in a year gets four or more papers published, given a rate of N/52 papers per week.
