There is already a lot of explainable AI (XAI) and interpretability work being applied to physics. Am I misunderstanding the acronym?

@mariopasquato I'm using it to refer to Elon Musk's new AI company, xAI

@StrayClimb aha got it

There are a lot of physics journals in the "top 20".

I mean, okay, there are 20. But if I were to list "Top. Journals.", it would be a list of maybe 3-5. Conditional on XAI researchers getting published in any physics journal, I expect it to easily clear "Top 20". (I would expect it to be PRA, or PRB, or PRC, or PRD, or PRE, or PRX, right? And those ought to all count, because I can't name 20 journals above them. Can somebody else?)

@ScottLawrence ah I hadn't realized! There are really that few top physics journals? I'd imagined there might be leading ones for each subfield

@StrayClimb The journals get broader as they rise in prestige, and the "not quite top" journals publish the vast bulk of the reputable papers. So at the top level might be PRL, Nature, Science; then the next level is PRA/PRB/PRC/PRD/PRE/PRX (and perhaps their European equivalents) and JHEP. These are no narrower than "high energy physics" (JHEP and PRD) or "condensed matter" (PRB).

It's not that there literally aren't any other journals, of course. But those journals end up publishing more than half of the papers I come across on arxiv. If I add in the various european equivalents (EPJ A-E, I think?), then we still have only 14 or 15 journals and it covers maybe 90% of papers I've read.

For completeness, listing a few more to push it over 20:

• Reviews of Modern Physics

• J Chem Phys

• Annals of physics

• International Journal of Physics A-E

I've never read a paper in that last one; I think I once came across a paper in Annals. And putting "reviews of modern physics" in there is obviously a stretch.

@ScottLawrence

I think I once came across a paper in Annals

By some guy named Albert?;)

@wadimiusz Haha, took me a moment to figure it out. But... "Annals of Physics" != "Annalen der Physik". The former was started in the 1950s; the latter apparently pre-1800.