| Discipline | Mathematics |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publication details | |
| History | 1940–present |
| Publisher | American Mathematical Society (United States) |
| Standard abbreviations ISO 4 (alt) · Bluebook (alt) NLM (alt) · MathSciNet (alt  ) | |
| ISO 4 | Math. Rev. |
| Indexing CODEN (alt · alt2) · JSTOR (alt) · LCCN (alt) MIAR · NLM (alt) · Scopus · W&L | |
| ISSN | 0025-5629 |
| OCLC no. | 1756873 |
| Links | |
Mathematical Reviews is a journal published by theAmerican Mathematical Society (AMS) that contains brief synopses, and in some cases evaluations, of many articles inmathematics,statistics, andtheoretical computer science.[1][2] The AMS also publishes an associated onlinebibliographic database calledMathSciNet, which contains an electronic version ofMathematical Reviews.
Mathematical Reviews was founded byOtto E. Neugebauer in 1940[3] as an alternative to the German journalZentralblatt für Mathematik,[4] which Neugebauer had also founded a decade earlier, but which under the Nazis had begun censoring reviews by and of Jewish mathematicians.[3] The goal of the new journal was to give reviews of every mathematical research publication. As of November 2007, theMathematical Reviews database contained information on over 2.2 million articles. The authors of reviews are volunteers, usually chosen by the editors because of some expertise in the area of the article. It andZentralblatt für Mathematik are the only comprehensive resources of this type. (The Mathematics section ofReferativny Zhurnal is available only inRussian and is smaller in scale and difficult to access.) Often reviews give detailed summaries of the contents of the paper, sometimes with critical comments by the reviewer and references to related work. However, reviewers are not encouraged to criticize the paper, because the author does not have an opportunity to respond. The author's summary may be quoted when it is not possible to give an independent review, or when the summary is deemed adequate by the reviewer or the editors. Only bibliographic information may be given when a work is in an unusual language, when it is a brief paper in a conference volume, or when it is outside the primary scope of the Reviews. Originally the reviews were written in several languages, but later an "English only" policy was introduced. Selected reviews (called "featured reviews") were also published as a book by the AMS, but this program has been discontinued.
| Producer | American Mathematical Society |
|---|
In 1980, all the contents ofMathematical Reviews since 1940 were integrated into an electronic searchable database. Eventually the contents became part ofMathSciNet, which was officially launched in 1996.[2] MathSciNet also has extensive citation information.[5]
Mathematical Reviews computes amathematical citation quotient (MCQ) for each journal. Like theimpact factor and other similarcitation rates, this is a numerical statistic that measures the frequency of citations to a journal.[6] The MCQ is calculated by counting the total number of citations into the journal that have been indexed byMathematical Reviews over a five-year period, and dividing this total by the total number of papers published by the journal during that five-year period.
For the period 2012–2014, the top five journals inMathematical Reviews by MCQ were:[7]
The "All Journal MCQ" is computed by considering all the journals indexed byMathematical Reviews as a single meta-journal, which makes it possible to determine if a particular journal has a higher or lower MCQ than average. The 2018 All Journal MCQ is 0.41.
Current Mathematical Publications was a subject index in print format that published the newest and upcoming mathematical literature, chosen and indexed byMathematical Reviews editors. It covered the period from 1965 until 2012, when it was discontinued.[8]
