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Mathematical Reviews is a journal and online database published by the American Mathematical Society that contains brief synopses (and occasionally evaluations) of many articles in mathematics, statistics and theoretical computer science. Selected reviews (called "featured reviews") are also published as a book by the AMS.
Contents |
Reviews
The journal was founded by Otto E. Neugebauer in 19401 as an alternative to the German journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik.2 The goal was to give reviews of every mathematical research publication. As of November 2007, the Mathematical 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 and Zentralblatt für Mathematik are the only comprehensive resources of this type. (The Mathematics section of Referativny Zhurnal is available only in Russian 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 of the primary scope of the Reviews. Originally the reviews were written in several languages, but later an "English only" policy was introduced.
Online database
In 1980, all the contents of Mathematical Reviews since 1940 were integrated into an electronic searchable database. Eventually the contents became part of MathSciNet3, which, along with reviews, also has now citation information (albeit primarily limited to other articles in MathSciNet). Mathematical Reviews and MathSciNet have become an essential tool for researchers in the mathematical sciences.
Unlike most other abstracting databases, MathSciNet takes care to identify authors properly.4 Its author search allows the user to correctly find publications associated with a given author record, even if multiple authors have exactly the same name. Math Reviews personnel will sometimes even contact authors to ensure that the database has correctly attributed their papers. On the other hand, the general search menu uses string matching in all fields, including the author field. This functioning is needed for the database to access some old reviews (before 1940) which have not yet been completely integrated and thus cannot be found by searching for the author first.
MathSciNet provides BibTeX entries with all reviews, and its abbreviations of journal titles have become a de facto standard in mathematical publishing. Both Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt für Mathematik use the Mathematics Subject Classification codes for organizing their reviews.
Scope
MathSciNet contains information on about 2 million articles from 18,000 mathematical journals, many of them abstracted "cover-to-cover" [1][2]. In addition, reviews or bibliographical information on selected articles is included from many engineering, computer science and other applied journals abstracted by MathSciNet. The selection is done by the editors of the Mathematical Reviews. The editors accept suggestions to cover additional journals, but do not reconsider missing articles for inclusion [3].
See also
- Referativnyi Zhurnal, published in former Soviet Union and now in Russia
- Zentralblatt MATH, published in Germany
- INSPEC
- Web of Science
- IEEE Explore
- Current Index to Statistics
References
- ^ Allyn Jackson (1997), "Chinese Acrobatics, an Old-Time Brewery, and the "Much Needed Gap": The life of Mathematical Reviews", Notices of the American Mathematical Society 44 (3): 330–337, http://www.ams.org/notices/199703/comm-mr.pdf
- ^ D.H. Lehmer (1988), "A half century of reviewing", in Peter Duren, A Century of Mathematics in America, Part I, American Mathematical Society, http://www.ams.org/online_bks/hmath1/hmath1-lehmer18.pdf
- ^ Margaret Dominy and Jay Bhatt (2001), "MathSciNet: Mathematical Reviews on the Web, a Review", Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Summer 2001), http://www.istl.org/01-summer/databases2.html
- ^ TePaske-King, Bert; Norman Richert (2001), "The Identification of Authors in the Mathematical Reviews Database", Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Summer 2001), http://www.istl.org/01-summer/databases.html
External links
- Mathematical Reviews database with access to the online search function for the database (for subscribers), and links to information about the service, such as the following:
- Mathematical Reviews editorial statement outlines the mission of Mathematical Reviews;
- Mathematical Reviews guide for reviewers is a useful resource both for reviewers and users of Mathematical Reviews.
- MathSciNet FAQ
- Exceptional MathReviews collected by Kimball Martin and sorted by amusement factor.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 30 December 2008, at 20:09.
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