Which journals publish expository work? - MathOverflow

Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T21:24:03Z

I wonder if anyone else has noticed that the market for expository papers in mathematics is very narrow (more so than it used to be, perhaps).

Are there any journals which publish expository work, especially at the "intermediate" level? By intermediate, I mean neither (i) aimed at an audience of students, especially undergraduate students (e.g. Mathematics Magazine) nor (ii) surveys of entire fields of mathematics and/or descriptions of spectacular new results written by veteran experts in the field (e.g. the Bulletin, the Notices).

Let me give some examples from my own writing, mostly just to fix ideas. (I do not mean to complain.)

1) About six years ago I submitted an expository paper "On the discrete geometry of Chicken McNuggets" to the American Mathematical Monthly. The point of the paper was to illustrate the utility of simple reasoning about lattices in Euclidean space to give a proof of Schur's Theorem on the number of representations of an integer by a linear form in positive integers. The paper was rejected; one reviewer said something like (I paraphrase) "I have the feeling that this would be a rather routine result for someone versed in the geometry of numbers." This shows that the paper was not being viewed as expository -- i.e., a work whose goal is the presentation of a known result in a way which will make it accessible and appealing to a broader audience. I shared the news with my officemate at the time, Dr. Gil Alon, and he found the topic interesting. Together we "researchized" the paper by working a little harder and proving some (apparently) new exact formulas for representation numbers. This new version was accepted by the Journal of Integer Sequences:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL8/Clark/clark80.html

This is not a sad story for me overall because I learned more about the problem ("The Diophantine Problem of Frobenius") in writing the second version with Gil. But still, something is lost: the first version was a writeup of a talk that I have given to advanced undergraduate / basic graduate audiences at several places. For a long time, this was my "general audience" talk, and it worked at getting people involved and interested: people always came up to me afterward with further questions and suggested improvements, much more so than any arithmetic geometry talk I have ever given. The main result in our JIS paper is unfortunately a little technical [not deep, not sophisticated; just technical: lots of gcd's and inverses modulo various things] to state, and although I have recommended to several students to read this paper, so far nothing has come of it.

2) A few years ago I managed to reprove a theorem of Luther Claborn (every abelian group is isomorphic to the class group of some Dedekind domain) by using elliptic curves along the lines of a suggestion by Michael Rosen (who reproved the result in the countable case). I asked around and was advised to submit the paper to L'Enseignement Mathematique. In my writeup, I made the conscious decision to write the paper in an expository way: that is, I included a lot of background material and explained connections between the various results, even things which were not directly related to the theorem in question. The paper was accepted; but the referee made it clear that s/he would have preferred a more streamlined, research oriented approach. Thus EM, despite its name ("Mathematical Education"), seems to be primarily a research journal (which likes papers taking new looks at old or easily stated problems: it's certainly a good journal and I'm proud to be published in it), and I was able to smuggle in some exposition under the cover of a new research result.

3) I have an expository paper on factorization in integral domains:

http://math.uga.edu/~pete/factorization.pdf

[Added: And a newer version: http://math.uga.edu/~pete/factorization2010.pdf.]

It is not finished and not completely polished, but it has been circulating around the internet for about a year now. Again, this completely expository paper has attracted more attention than most of my research papers. Sometimes people talk about it as though it were a preprint or an actual paper, but it isn't: I do not know of any journal that would publish a 30 page paper giving an intermediate-level exposition of the theory of factorization in integral domains. Is there such a journal?

Added: In my factorization paper, I build on similar expositions by the leading algebraists P. Samuel and P.M. Cohn. I think these two papers, published in 1968 and 1973, are both excellent examples of the sort of "intermediate exposition" I have in mind (closer to the high end of the range, but still intermediate: one of the main results Samuel discusses, Nagata's Theorem, was published in 1957 so was not exactly hot off the presses when Samuel wrote his article). Both articles were published by the American Mathematical Monthly! I don't think the Monthly would publish either of them nowadays.

Added: I have recently submitted a paper to the Monthly:

http://math.uga.edu/~pete/coveringnumbersv2.pdf

(By another coincidence, this paper is a mildly souped up answer to MO question #26. But I did the "research" on this paper in the lonely pre-MO days of 2008.)

Looking at this paper helps me to see that the line between research and exposition can be blurry. I think it is primarily an expository paper -- in that the emphasis is on the presentation of the results rather than the results themselves -- but I didn't have the guts to submit it anywhere without claiming some small research novelty: "The computation of the irredundant linear covering number appears to be new." I'll let you know what happens to it.

(Added: it was accepted by the Monthly.)

Answer by Yemon Choi for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T21:29:37Z

I'm not too familiar with Expositiones Mathematicae, but have you given them a look?

EDIT: The article I happened to have seen, which made me think that Expo Math might be along the lines Pete Clark was looking for, is this paper of T. Bühler - it modestly claims to no originality save for assembling disparate parts of the literature and writing down what's old news to connoisseurs (I'm paraphrasing here!) but of course this is, in a sense, precisely its originality & worth.

Answer by Simon Salamon for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T22:12:41Z

You can certainly find such journals if you are not too career-minded. Although there are not many examples in recent issues, Rendiconti Torino has open access and a tradition of publishing occasional expository articles, though typically less than 30 pages. It will effectively referee such papers provided that they appear to have a novel approach (as is the case of yours) thta cannot be found elsewhere. Publishing in such a journal may be more satisfying than simply leaving a paper on a homepage or the arXiv (which you can still do anyway). [I am its director, but it's a non-profit concern and I feel that such publicity is in the community's interest.]

Answer by aorq for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T22:26:30Z

It may seem to you like the market for expository papers has narrowed, but I think it has increased tenfold. Personal blogs appear to be the medium of choice for exposition these days. I am sure you are aware of this (in part because many high-profile Mathoverflow users have popular blogs), but I just wanted to remind you that blogs can reach a wide and interested audience. Perhaps not everything belongs in a journal.

EDIT (Douglas S. Stones): Adding to the "alternative to journals" answer -- authors could consider writing a book instead.

Answer by Gerry Myerson for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T22:55:52Z

I have published a few expository pieces in The Australian Mathematical Society Gazette in recent years.

Answer by Douglas S. Stones for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T23:13:31Z

The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics have these "Dynamic Surveys" which are allowed to be updated -- some of which are quite massive.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that there is another category, called "articles", in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics which include non-dynamic surveys and exposition papers. At the moment, there are not many such articles, but there are some (I counted 14 in total).

Research articles as well as surveys and articles of more general interest are welcome.

Answer by Mariano Suárez-Alvarez for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T23:34:01Z

The AMS Bulletin publishes very high quality expository papers.

Answer by Noah Snyder for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-15T23:43:54Z

The Moscow Journal of Math says they publish "research-expository articles."

"An important specific trait of the journal is that it especially encourages research-expository papers, which must contain new important results and include detailed introductions, placing the achievements in the context of other studies and explaining the motivation behind the research. The aim is to make the articles — at least the formulation of the main results and their significance — understandable to a wide mathematical audience rather than to a narrow class of specialists."

I'm not sure exactly how that plays out in practice, I haven't submitted any articles there. But it looks like it's worth a try for certain sorts of articles with significant expository content.

Answer by Felipe Voloch for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-16T02:03:39Z

L'enseignement mathématique: http://www.unige.ch/math/EnsMath/

For longer papers: Ensaios Matemáticos: http://www.sbm.org.br/pageviews.php?menu=5&secao=ensaios,&idcol=129

Disclaimer/shameless plug: I am an editor of the latter.

Answer by Mark Meckes for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-16T15:16:44Z

In probability, there's Probability Surveys. From their web site:

Probability Surveys publishes survey articles in theoretical and applied probability. The style of articles may range from reviews of recent research to graduate textbook exposition. Articles may be broad or narrow in scope. The essential requirements are a well specified topic and target audience, together with clear exposition.

Answer by Igor Pak for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-16T18:57:05Z

In fact, many journals give this option, but very few people use it. For example, Discrete Mathematics has something they call "perspectives paper" which is basically high quality survey paper on a novel topic or a novel technique: http://tinyurl.com/yh9swnn My understanding is that these perspectives paper undergo the usual refereeing process.

P.S. Full disclosure - I am an editor of DM.

Answer by Gerald Edgar for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-17T12:37:38Z

These journals say that they publish expository and/or survey papers...

DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA
Global Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
International Journal of Modern Mathematics
INTERNATIONAL MATHEMATICAL FORUM
Journal of Analysis and Applications
Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics
Lobachevskii Journal of Mathematics
Logic and Analysis
Journal of Mathematical Sciences: Advances and Applications
Surveys in Mathematics and its Applications

Another possibility: Lecture Notes in Mathematics (Springer) or similar. But only for longer expository pieces: Lecture Notes has a minimum of 100 pages.

Answer by Gerald Edgar for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-17T16:31:32Z

On placing the expository paper "Transseries for Beginners"
(too long for a comment)

Transseries arise when we complete things in a certain way by including formal series, exponentials, and logarithms. But they have come up in non-trivial ways in many parts of mathematics: real analysis, model theory, computer algebra, dynamical systems, surreal numbers. So it seemed that an exposition NOT using the special knowledge or jargon of one area but accessible to all would be good. That is what this paper tries to be.

I tried at first to place it in a general-mathematics journal. Starting with the Monthly. But did not succeed. So in fact it will appear in the Real Analysis Exchange. (One of the three types of papers they publish are "survey" papers.) And interested people in other areas (who don't regularly scan the contents of that journal) will have to find out about it somehow.

For the Monthly: The paper was 30 pages then, but still on the borderline of being too long and on the borderline of being too technical. Journals I tried averaged 8 months to reach a decision. In all, from first submission (August 1, 2007) to acceptance (January 31, 2010) was exactly two and a half years.

Answer by Jérôme Poineau for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-18T08:01:53Z

I just wanted to comment on Pete's answer to Felipe Voloch but it seems I can't so I'll write an answer instead. I think that L'Enseignement Mathématique does publish purely expository papers. I have two examples in mind (hope I'm not mistaken):

L. Illusie "Catégories dérivées et dualité: travaux de J.-L. Verdier" Enseign. Math. (2) 36 (1990), no. 3-4, 369--391
J. Nicaise "Formal and rigid geometry: an intuitive introduction and some applications." Enseign. Math. (2) 54 (2008), no. 3-4, 213--249

Answer by Graham Leuschke for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-02-20T14:15:17Z

The Journal of Commutative Algebra publishes expository/survey papers. Your article on factorization might be appropriate, though I have not looked at it. Disclosure: I am an editor for JCA.

Answer by Robb Fry for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-03-14T02:15:12Z

Dear Prof Clark,

I had a good experience a few years ago with Expositiones Mathematicae (an article on bump functions), and it seems that a fair number of colleagues happened upon it - so it is not obscure. This may be a good venue for you. I quite enjoy expository work, and lament the fact that many departments (and granting agencies) do not value them highly. Good Luck.

R. Fry

Answer by mathphysicist for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-03-15T23:42:59Z

Just in case, as it seems that nobody has already mentioned this above: Russian Mathematical Surveys (the English translation of Uspekhi Matematichekikh Nauk) also publish quite a number of high-quality survey papers which usually occupy most of the issue but these papers are almost always written by Russian authors (and, I guess, at least some of them are just solicited by the Editorial Board).

Answer by mathphysicist for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-03-16T00:17:37Z

And here is another journal that publishes long papers of "utility for a broad readership of specialists in the domain": Dissertationes Mathematicae. Apparently they quite often publish entire Ph.D. theses.

Answer by Douglas S. Stones for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-05-14T01:35:51Z

Apparantly the Japanese Journal of Mathematics is focused on survey/exposition papers:

The official journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan, the Japanese Journal of Mathematics is devoted to authoritative research survey articles that will promote future progress in mathematics. It encourages advanced and clear expositions, giving new insights on topics of current interest from broad perspectives and/or reviewing all major developments in an important area over many years.

Answer by Terry Loring for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-05-17T07:40:00Z

From their website:

"Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics publishes both research and expository articles in mathematics, and particularly invites well-written survey articles."

A search in Math Reviews shows many articles in RMJM described as expository, either by the authors or by the reviewer. Often there is disagreement as to whether a paper is expository, which indicates the utility of having a journal that publishes both research and expository articles.

I am on the board of the Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium.

I have found it nearly impossible to write an expository paper that stays that expository. New results have a way of being found by authors who are trying to clean up proofs of existing results.

Answer by Greg Friedman for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-07-09T03:07:58Z

There's an online Mexican journal Morfismos that seems to specialize mainly in surveys: http://chucha.math.cinvestav.mx/morfismos/indenglish.html It seems to be a small-ish operation, but they've published expository papers by well-known authors such as Snaith, Landweber, Kontsevich, and Kervaire. Unfortunately they are not listed on Math Reviews yet, but I understand this may be in their future.

Answer by Martin Gisser for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-09-23T04:02:55Z

I want to second Deane's comment on the usefulness of blogs (wikis). We can TeX, meanwhile, anywhere, anyhow. There could be a very fruitful symbiosis between blog and journal. The blog symbiont is the garden where expositions grow, perhaps fertilized if not seeded by commenters. Each symbiont consists of two poles: medium vs. reader. The journal symbiont faces the problem that its reader can not always write in it (or the marginals get closed away in one library somewhere). So, blogs (wikis) can also serve the marginals, something the medieval libraries knew to value.

This might hint at a new internet gadget. Which reminds me of another gadget: The user-sorted printout shelves, to be set up in and moderated by the library.

...Ooh, could amount to an extremely worthwhile internets programming project, including organizing real paper work, sort, and storage.

Answer by gowers for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-09-23T11:55:48Z

I too have thought that there should be such a journal, and found that Expositiones Mathematicae somehow doesn't stop me thinking that.

I think that if one were founding a new expository journal, then a very important feature that it should have would be that getting an article into the journal should be prestigious. And for that it should be difficult to do.

What makes it difficult to write an expository article? One obvious thing is if the mathematics you are writing about is very hard to understand. Sometimes, writing a good clear expository article involves digging deep into the thought processes of another mathematician who has not taken the trouble to say what they were, or of finding a clever way of presenting something that makes it much clearer where the ideas came from. Writing an expository article of this kind is pretty similar to research, in that it involves solving difficult problems. And one could argue that the value to other mathematicians of a good expository article is usually greater than the value of a good research article. (Perhaps I ought to change that "usually" to "often".)

Other features of a journal that I think would make good sense are that it should be online and open access (with plenty of links to other internet resources such as blogs and wikis), and that writing about one's own work should be forbidden. Also, referees should not necessarily be experts in the area being written about, and should be encouraged to be completely honest if there are parts of the article they do not understand.

The advantage of an online journal is that with no pressure to produce issues on a regular basis one could keep the standard of acceptance very high. Perhaps one could even make it so high that the appearance of a new article would be something of an event. But the main thing is that it should be a significant contribution to a CV, or else the motivation for writing such an article would not be high enough.

Answer by Sándor Kovács for Which journals publish expository work?

2010-10-03T00:07:18Z

Due to the efforts of new managing editor, Fedor Bogomolov, the Central European Journal of Mathematics is currently very interested in expository articles. You should try it.

Answer by Kevin O'Bryant for Which journals publish expository work?

2011-02-02T15:17:05Z

The front page of the Notices (Jan 2011) is an advertisement for the "Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences". The "Aims and Scope" are:

The Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences, a peer-reviewed free access journal, will publish original research work of highest quality and of broad interest in all branches of mathematical sciences. The Bulletin will publish well-written expository articles (40-50 pages) of exceptional value giving the latest state of the art on a specific topic, and short articles (about 10 pages) containing significant results of wider interest. Most of the expository articles will be invited.

One of the executive editors is Efim Zelmanov, so that certainly counts as a "big-shot" getting behind the effort.

Answer by quid for Which journals publish expository work?

2011-03-25T16:21:59Z

I just came across the following new publication. SpringerBriefs in Mathematics. (Somewhere between a paper and a book; 50-125.) I think It is not what was originally asked for, but might be close to some things that came up in the discussion.

Since it is new, and I only know what is written on the webpage, the relevance of this to the subject at hand is not yet completely clear to me. Still, I hope it is close enough to be on-topic. [Some of the text below is the same for all Briefs in different fields, which might explain some possibly surprising formulations.]

From http://www.springer.com/series/10030

Excerpts from the page.

SpringerBriefs present concise summaries of cutting-edge research and practical applications across a wide spectrum of fields. Featuring compact volumes of 50 to 125 pages, the series covers a range of content from professional to academic. [...]

Typical topics might include:

.) A timely report of state-of-the art techniques .) A bridge between new research results, as published in journal articles, and a contextual literature review .) A snapshot of a hot or emerging topic .) An in-depth case study .) A presentation of core concepts that students must understand in order to make independent contributions

SpringerBriefs in Mathematics showcase expositions in all areas of mathematics and applied mathematics. Manuscripts presenting new results or a single new result in a classical field, new field, or an emerging topic, applications, or bridges between new results and already published works, are encouraged. The series is intended for mathematicians, applied mathematicians.

Answer by Samuel Vidal for Which journals publish expository work?

2012-05-20T19:39:55Z

Have you considered writing a Math blog ? Or sending your original paper for 'invited post' to an existing math-blog writer with appropriate scope and audience. Math blogs don't have the permanence of a math journal. But I'm pretty sure they get more attention from students than Expository math journals.

Your question reminds me of one of my favorite math paper Fractions by L.R. Ford in Amer. Math. Monthly Vol. 45, No. 9 (Nov., 1938), pp. 586-601. The first sentence of the paper is particularly delightful when thinking of the far reaching consequences this paper had. Take Rademacher exact formula for the partition number for example...

Answer by Pierre Dehornoy for Which journals publish expository work?

2012-06-10T19:15:00Z

As it has not been cited before, there is also a recent journal devoted exactly to what you suggest, Confluentes Mathematici http://www.worldscinet.com/cm/mkt/aims_scope.shtml

Answer by William for Which journals publish expository work?

2013-03-29T23:44:45Z

Just last night I was looking for a journal that would accept a (largely) survey paper with some new results. I discovered for myself Aequationes Mathematicae. I had previously considered Expositiones Mathematicae, but had uneasy feelings about it since it is Elsavier (my first and only, and very recent, experience with Elsevier was not a pleasant one). Aequat. Math. is published by Springer (however, see my comments below about Springer).

From the description of Aequat. Math.:

$\bullet$ An international journal of pure and applied mathematics, which emphasizes functional equations, dynamical systems, iteration theory, combinatorics, and geometry.

$\bullet$ Publishes research papers, high quality survey articles, reports of meetings, bibliographies, and summaries of recent developments and research in the field.

aequationes mathematicae is an international journal of pure and applied mathematics, which emphasizes functional equations, dynamical systems, iteration theory, combinatorics, and geometry. The journal publishes research papers, reports of meetings, and bibliographies. High quality survey articles are an especially welcome feature. In addition, summaries of recent developments and research in the field are published rapidly.

However, it seems that they rather restrict the spectrum of fields in which they publish (the first point above).

A few words about Springer: Depending on your view on science journals, you may have uneasy feelings about publishing in Springer. It seems that some mathematicians are considering boycotting Springer (e.g. J. Baez here) for various reasons (such as rising journal costs). I don't know much about this issue, but we all know about the situation with Elsevier.