Journal Guide

The growth in all aspects of research in the last decade has led to a multitude of new publications and an exponential increase in published research. Finding a way through the excellent existing literature and keeping up to date has become a major time-consuming problem. Electronic publishing has given researchers instant access to more articles than ever before. But which articles are the essential ones that should be read to understand and keep abreast with developments of any topic? To address this problem Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval - FnTIR publishes high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field using modern techniques to enable both instant linking to the primary research in its electronic form and affordable paper copies, finally delivering on the promise to authors of multiple channel publishing from a single source. Each issue of Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval - FnT IR comprises a 50-100 page monograph written by research leaders in the field. Monographs that give tutorial coverage of subjects, research retrospectives as well as survey papers that offer state-of-the-art reviews fall within the scope of the journal. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval will publish survey and tutorial articles on the following topics: Applications of IR Architectures for IR Collaborative filtering and recommender systems Cross-lingual and multilingual IR Distributed IR and federated search Evaluation issues and test collections for IR Formal models and language models for IR IR on mobile platforms Indexing and retrieval of structured documents Information categorization and clustering Information extraction Information filtering and routing Metasearch, rank aggregation and data fusion Natural language processing for IR Performance issues for IR systems, including algorithms, data structures, optimization techniques, and scalability Question answering Summarization of single documents, multiple documents, and corpora Text mining Topic detection and tracking Usability, interactivity, and visualization issues in IR User modelling and user studies for IR Web search

Foundations of Chemistry is an international journal which seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum where chemists, biochemists, philosophers, historians, educators and sociologists with an interest in foundational issues can discuss conceptual and fundamental issues which relate to the `central science' of chemistry. Such issues include the autonomous role of chemistry between physics and biology and the question of the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics.

The journal will publish peer-reviewed academic articles on a wide range of subdisciplines, among others: chemical models, chemical language, metaphors, and theoretical terms: chemical evolution and artificial self-replication: industrial application, environmental concern, and the social and ethical aspects of chemistry's professionalism: the nature of modeling and the role of instrumentation in chemistry: institutional studies and the nature of explanation in the chemical sciences: theoretical chemistry, molecular structure and chaos: the issue of realism: molecular biology, bio-inorganic chemistry: historical studies on ancient chemistry, medieval chemistry and alchemy: philosophical and historical articles: and material of a didactic nature relating to all topics in the chemical sciences.

Foundations of Chemistry plans to feature special issues devoted to particular themes, and will contain book reviews and discussion notes.

Audience: chemists, biochemists, philosophers, historians, chemical educators, sociologists, and other scientists with an interest in the foundational issues of science.

Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM) publishes research and survey papers of the highest quality, which further the understanding of the connections between mathematics and computation, including the interfaces between pure and applied mathematics, numerical analysis and computer science.

Our views of the physical world are changing rapidly. Humanity's continuing search for coherent structures in physics, biology, and cosmology has frequently led to surprises as well as confusion. Discovering new phenomena is one thing, putting them into context with other pieces of knowledge, and inferring their fundamental consequences is quite something else. There are controversies, differences of opinion, and sometimes even religious feelings which come into play. These should be discussed openly. Philosophical issues that are of a general, nontechnical nature should be handled in the opinion pages of the news media, but when the discussed arguments become too technical for that, when peer review is needed to select the really valuable pieces of insight, only a distinguished scientific journal is the appropriate form.

Foundations of Physics is an international journal devoted to the conceptual bases and fundamental theories of modern physics and cosmology, emphasizing the logical, methodological, and

Foundations of Science focuses on methodological and philosophical topics of foundational significance concerning the structure and the growth of science. It serves as a forum for exchange of views and ideas among working scientists and theorists of science and it seeks to promote interdisciplinary cooperation.

Since the various scientific disciplines have become so specialized and inaccessible to workers in different areas of science, one of the goals of the journal is to present the foundational issues of science in a way that is free from unnecessary technicalities yet faithful to the scientific content. The aim of the journal is not simply to identify and highlight foundational issues and problems, but to suggest constructive solutions to the problems.

The editors of the journal admit that various sciences have approaches and methods that are peculiar to those individual sciences. However, they hold the view that important truths can be discovered about and by the sciences and that truths transcend cultural and political contexts. Although properly conducted historical and sociological inquiries can explain some aspects of the scientific enterprise, the editors believe that the central foundational questions of contemporary science can be posed and answered without recourse to sociological or historical methods.