Timeline for When to start reviewing
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 3, 2014 at 10:50 | comment | added | Stefan Geschke | Isn't it the case that Zentralblatt gives you the three first search results for free, but not more than that? It is still useful occasionally, when I need to search for something without having access to a university computer. | |
| Feb 11, 2011 at 6:23 | comment | added | William Stein | I do not like that reviews in MathSciNet are locked behind a paywall, despite them being contributed for free by the mathematical community. I never use Zentralblatt, but I tried the webpage just now and it appears to be free. Unfortunately, Zentralblatt appears difficult to use; I was unable to find any actual reviews after a few minutes of frustrated clicking. (I remember the days of using MathReviews on paper in the library, and later via CD's... now that was difficult.) | |
| Feb 11, 2010 at 6:08 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | Moreover, delays in refereeing can have dire consequences -- they can result in excellent mathematicians not finding their next job. Reviewing delays are at worst mildly inconvenient. My one paper on Shimura curves appeared in 2009 and hasn't been reviewed. I can wait. Anyone else who is interested can simply read the abstract/introduction. Many reviews simply quote from the paper anyway. Now that the papers themselves are as easily available as their reviews, it is the good reviews that are of value to the community, but there is no way to guarantee that a review will be good! | |
| Feb 11, 2010 at 5:56 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | ...But I still get more requests to referee papers on Shimura curves than on everything else put together: there is a small group of people who are continuing to write papers in this area, so if I always said no, it would make a lot of editors' lives more difficult. The bottom line is that each paper you write requires a certain nontrivial [sometimes considerable] amount of time on the part of some other research mathematician to referee: let's say, at least 10 hours for most papers. If I write 50 papers and never referee any, this is 500 hours of debt. | |
| Feb 11, 2010 at 5:49 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | Some people like to write reviews and are good at writing them quickly: e.g. J.H. silverman has written hundreds of nice reviews. It takes me something like a full day's work to write a single math review: I write much too much and tehn try to apre it down to only somewhat too much. On the other hand, for a given paper, the available pool of competent referees may be very small. For instance, because of my thesis work, I am an expert on Shimura curves. Less than 20% of my published research has been on Shimura curves, and to a certain extent I have moved on to other interests... | |
| Feb 11, 2010 at 5:44 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | There are research mathematicians that do not read MathReviews or Zentralblatt. If neither existed, the mathematical community would be impoverished, certainly, but it would still function. If you write 50 papers which get nice reviews [note also: some reviews are not very helpful, and not everyone is good at writing succinct, useful reviews] and never write any reviews yourself, then I agree that you are accruing a karmic debt to the global mathematical community, but that can be repaid in many ways: having one PhD student, for instance, is worth an extremely large number of reviews... | |
| Feb 10, 2010 at 19:24 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | Some people are in better situations to write reviews so they write a disproportionate amount. If you ever get a chance to read the Steenrod compilation "Reviews of papers in Algebraic and Differential Topoogy, Topological Groups, and Homological Algebra" (two big fat blue AMS books) do. They're a wonderful example, especially if you're trying to get a sense for the history of the subject. | |
| Feb 10, 2010 at 12:38 | comment | added | JS Milne | No, you are not obligated to do everything that would benefit the community, but that's not the point here. When you benefit from the volunteer efforts of others, you have an obligation to contribute your share. From another (Kantian) point of view, if everyone decided not to review there would be no reviews, which would be bad for everyone. I don't see much of a difference between reviewing and refereeing in this respect. | |
| Feb 9, 2010 at 6:49 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @JSM: Although I do write for MathReviews currently (in fact I just finished one tonight), I do not feel ethically obligated to do so. I do not want to try to talk you out of it, but I feel that on a purely philosophical level there must be some fallacy here: are we really ethically obligated to do everything that would benefit the community? It seems hard to believe. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:44 | history | answered | JS Milne | CC BY-SA 2.5 |