Mathematical Reviews Editorial Statement
Mathematical Reviews® is a database (the MRDB) for the mathematical sciences, produced by the American Mathematical Society, curated by mathematicians, and published on the web as MathSciNet.
Since its founding in 1940, Mathematical Reviews (MR) has aimed to serve researchers and scholars in the mathematical sciences by providing timely information on articles, books and other published material that contain new contributions to mathematical research. In addition, the MRDB contains data on advanced-level textbooks and expository books and papers that may not contain new research, but that appear to be of interest to scholars and research mathematicians. It is MR policy to cover articles and books in other disciplines that contain new mathematical results or give novel and interesting applications of known mathematics. Elementary articles or books, or articles that have not been refereed are ordinarily not listed. Articles and books that are not in the published literature are not considered for coverage.
The bibliographical data for new items (monographs, collections, papers in journals and collections, etc., in paper and electronic formats) is carefully prepared and added to the MRDB on a daily basis. Wherever possible, links to online locations of electronic copies of the material are provided. Most items in the MRDB are classified in accordance with the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC). Identification of author names appearing in items added to the MRDB is given special attention; this, in particular, enables users of MR information to retrieve the publications of a given individual.
Each day, reviews are added to items in the MRDB. Many of these items are reviewed by experts selected by the MR editors. For some items, the reviewer (or MR editor) recommends that the author's summary or other abstract from the text be used as a review, provided the selected text gives good guidance for the user of the MRDB on the content of the item. References in reviews to other items in the literature are associated with the MRDB entries for those items whenever possible.
MRDB entries for recent items in a selected list of journals and series include the complete reference list from the original item. Items in the reference lists are linked to the corresponding MRDB entries whenever possible. Each reviewed item in the MRDB appears first as a bibliographic listing. A number of items that appear to be of interest are listed bibliographically in the MRDB but are not later given a review, although each is fully classified. The MRDB also includes a collection of unclassified items, which are not reviewed.
See also the MR Policy on Indexing Electronic Journals.
This statement was revised by the Mathematical Reviews Editorial Committee October 2019.