Timeline for How should the Math Subject Classification (MSC) be revised or improved?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 25, 2016 at 17:59 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | From my point of view, the reviews at Mathscinet are of limited value, too, so I am not at all convinced by the argument "MSC codes are useful because reviews". | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 12:18 | comment | added | Boyarsky | @Jim: Your description of its uses is consistent with what I was thinking; if the way I wrote made it sound flippant, that was not intentional (perhaps the phrase "make life easier" was not a good way to put it). I know how much effort they put into these things (and know some people who work at MR). The basic upshot is that I honestly had no idea (until Protsak mentioned it) that MR actually used these in their work, though it is obvious in hindsight. Now that I know this, I will be more attentive to it with my papers! | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 12:01 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys | @Boyarsky: It's unfair to the Math Reviews staff to characterize the classification that way. They do need a fairly stable and hierarchical classification scheme in order to assign papers to editors and then to contact appropriate reviewers. But the scheme is also needed by users to retrieve information over many decades. It's easy to pass suggestions along to MathSciNet for changes, but these occur slowly in collaboration with Zentralblatt and have to preserve the archival search framework. I've persuaded them over the years to refine the classification in areas of interest to me. | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 6:17 | comment | added | JBorger | There have been a small number of times when I've found keywords and the MSC useful. About 7 years ago, I decided I wanted to know about everything that was known about Witt vectors. It was pretty easy to find lots of new papers by doing MSC and keyword searches, and I found certain veins of knowledge, probably much earlier than I would have otherwise. More generally, the MSC and keywords are probably useful whenever you want to know what people know about a very specific topic that cuts across many different fields and which has an accepted name. | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 5:06 | comment | added | Boyarsky | @Victor: Oh, so its purpose is to make life easier for the folks at Math Reviews (e.g., to funnel the paper to the correct editor there)? And the Keywords help them to more easily pass the paper on to suitable reviewers? That makes a lot of sense. So it is like the story of US Social Security numbers. | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 4:32 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | MSC was created in order to categorize or sort the papers being reviewed. As with many other things, it acquired life of its own... | |
| Jun 16, 2010 at 4:03 | history | answered | Boyarsky | CC BY-SA 2.5 |