The year 2018 has ended already about three months ago but here is still a brief summary of 2018 in numbers for Kerr frequency comb publications, according to my collected references.
In the 49 Publication Update posts 110 publications were listed that feature Kerr frequency combs (or microresonator frequency combs or microcombs or dissipative Kerr solitons or cavity solitons in microresonators or theory on the Lugiato-Levefer equation (LLE) with a focus on the dynamics of Kerr frequency combs or some other related research). This includes many manuscripts twice as they were once included when they hit Arxiv and then again when they were published in a regular journal. Subtracting the 40 Arxiv manuscripts, there remain a very respectable 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals. It also means that our community is very open-minded, given that over 50% of the papers published are available on Arxiv openly and freely.
Looking at the peer-reviewed journals only:
By far the most popular journal is Optics Letters with 17 papers. Already next in line are Nature Photonics and maybe a bit more surprising Photonics Research with 6 papers each.
Looking at the well-known high-impact journals, the field of Kerr frequency combs gathered quite some impact there. From the same data as above:
| Nature | 3 |
| Science | 3 |
| Nature Photonics | 6 |
| Optica | 3 |
| Nature Communications | 3 |
| Physical Review Letters | 3 |
Again, quite respectable numbers. What I like in particular is that the field really is maturing. Many of these highly-ranked publications start to realize some of the promises made since the very beginning for applications in telecom, spectroscopy and metrology.
The year 2019 is already running for some time now, there has been quite a bit of work published so far. Let’s see, whether the statistics above can be topped in 2019. I feel it is going to be quite hard but of course not impossible and I know that a lot of people are pushing for this and will push for this to happen.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.