''Mathematical Reviews'' is a journal published by the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meeting ...

(AMS) that contains brief synopses, and in some cases evaluations, of many articles in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

statistics Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...

, and

theoretical computer science computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the ...

. The AMS also publishes an associated online bibliographic database called MathSciNet which contains an electronic version of ''Mathematical Reviews'' and additionally contains citation information for over 3.5 million items as of 2018.

Reviews

Mathematical Reviews was founded by Otto E. Neugebauer in 1940 as an alternative to the German journal ''

Zentralblatt für Mathematik zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructu ...

'', which Neugebauer had also founded a decade earlier, but which under the Nazis had begun censoring reviews by and of Jewish mathematicians. The goal of the new journal 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 ''

'' 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 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.

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 MathSciNet, which was officially launched in 1996. MathSciNet also has extensive citation information.

Mathematical citation quotient

''Mathematical Reviews'' computes a "mathematical citation quotient" (MCQ) for each journal. Like the

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

, this is a numerical statistic that measures the frequency of citations to a journal. The MCQ is calculated by counting the total number of citations into the journal that have been indexed by ''Mathematical 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 in ''Mathematical Reviews'' by MCQ were: # ''

Acta Numerica ''Acta Numerica'' is a mathematics journal publishing research on numerical analysis. It was established in 1992 to publish widely accessible summaries of recent advances in the field. One volume is published each year, consisting of review and s ...

'' — MCQ 8.14 # '' Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS'' — MCQ 5.06 # ''

Journal of the American Mathematical Society The ''Journal of the American Mathematical Society'' (''JAMS''), is a quarterly peer-reviewed mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in January 1988. Abstracting and indexing This journal is abs ...

'' — MCQ 4.79 # ''

Annals of Mathematics The ''Annals of Mathematics'' is a mathematical journal published every two months by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. History The journal was established as ''The Analyst'' in 1874 and with Joel E. Hendricks as th ...

'' — MCQ 4.60 # '' Forum of Mathematics, Pi'' — MCQ 4.54 The "All Journal MCQ" is computed by considering all the journals indexed by ''Mathematical 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''

''Current Mathematical Publications'' was a subject index in print format that published the newest and upcoming mathematical literature, chosen and indexed by ''Mathematical Reviews'' editors. It covered the period from 1965 until 2012, when it was discontinued.

References

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External links