Vicki Cleave arranged a virtual issue of the Journal of Polymer Science, Part B: Polymer Physics on Materials View website. All articles in this issue are selected from other journals on Wiley InterScience, in order to demonstrate how wide and interesting the content of modern polymer physics research can be.

The increase of impact factor of J. Polym. Sci., Part B has been lagging behind its sister Part A. 10 years ago, the two journals have close IFs, 1.7 for Part A and 1.2 for Part B. Their 2008 records become 3.8 and 1.5, respectively. Somewhat coincidently, RSC launched a new journal Polymer Chemistry this year, wherears there has been no new journal for polymer physics. These are some loose evidence of the declining of polymer physics research I have long felt about.

However, the virtual issue of Part B tried to tell us there were still high impact polymer physic research that happened to appear on other journals. It now suggests what are also research of polymer physics welcomes future submission from these fields. These areas of research, as indicated by the virtual issue, are:

• Biopolymers
• Photo-, electro- and/or magneto-active polymers and their devices
• Block copolymers (new only if they contain metals or are present on interfaces)

However, what physics is being extracted from these research areas? What problems of physics are still unanswered? And what models are proposed? Is there something similar to mean-field theory by P. Flory or the scaling theory by de Gennes going on? Or at least something similar to what Rouse & Zimm and Doi & Edward did?

The research on biopolymers can now follow a physic aspect only because the research of physics itself is penetrating biology. Little or no that was originally old polymer physics is applicable to biopolymers.

Photo-, electro- and/or magneto-active polymers are interesting because they are promising of soft devices. But ironically the design of them suffers much from their softness, which involves structural and dynamic heterogeniety at multiple timescale as well as nonequilibrium nature.

Block copolymer once attracted physicists after the control of polymer archetacture became easy thanks to controlled polymerization techniques such as ATRP and RAFT. However, now the research is largely simulations rather than theories.

So if Part B considers accepting papers of these research, it can boost its IF to some extent, but the cost is further blurring the concept of “polymer physics”.