Where to send a paper

Suppose you have just written your first paper in an area and now you want to figure out where to send it.  Maybe it’s your first paper ever.  (If so, congratulations!)  Maybe you normally work in one area, but had a good idea in a neighboring subject that turned into a paper.  How can you determine some suitable journals for your paper?  A good idea is to ask colleagues.  Here is something you can do with MathSciNet, as a supplement to colleagues’ advice or in case no one has any good suggestions.

I’m going to discuss this by using the example of representations of $p$-adic Lie groups, a subject that is on the boundary of what I know.

Step 1. Figure out the MSC class that represents the subject area.  If you managed to get some results and write a paper on the subject, you probably know a few papers in that area, or maybe some authors who work in the area.  For $p$-adic Lie groups, I know that Paul Sally worked extensively in the area.  Here are three papers by Sally that have “$p$-adic” in the title.

The class 22E50 is the primary classification for all three, with 22E35 as a secondary class on one of the papers.  Looking up the descriptions of the classes, we find:

22E35 Analysis on $p$-adic Lie groups

22E50 Representations of Lie and linear algebraic groups over local fields [See also 20G05]

It helps to know a couple of things here.  First, $p$-adic fields are local fields – indeed they are about the only examples of local fields I can think of without going to Wikipedia or MathWorld.  Second,  an important tool in studying representations of any sort of group is the analysis of the group’s characters, which are functions on the group related to the representations.  So, I am confident that 22E50 and 22E35 are reasonable classes to use, with 22E50 likely to be better because “representations” occurs in the description.

Step 2.  Do a Publications Search for MSC 22E50.

There are 1689 matches.

Step 3. In the search results, look in the sidebar under the heading “Journals”.

The journals are listed in decreasing order of the number of matches in the search results.  Here are the journals that have at least 20 articles with MSC 22E50 as the primary class.

 This gives you a list of journals to consider.

Step 4.  These articles are all on representations of groups over local fields, which is going to be a fairly tight match due to the narrowness of the definition of the subject area.  Some other classifications are broader, with more variations within the class.  Consider, for instance, 94A08 Image processing (compression, reconstruction, etc.) in information and communication theory.   This covers a lot of ground.  Indeed, a search for MSC Primary = 94A08 produces 11986 matches.   It might be sufficient to find a journal that publishes papers in image processing, but how close to the specific topic of your paper are they?  Close enough?  To look at the papers on image processing showing up in a particular journal, click on it in the sidebar. The search results are now filtered to include only papers from that journal.  You can now look to see if they are close to the topic of your paper.   If so, click on the journal’s name or abbreviation in any of the matches, which brings you to the MathSciNet profile page for that journal. You can then see information about the most frequently occurring authors in the journal, the most frequent 2-digit subject areas, the journal’s Math Citation Quotient (our computation of the number of citations divided by number of papers), and so on. There will also be a link to the journal’s website, where you will find information about how to submit a paper to the journal.