« January Notices
Baez Week 224 »

Mathematical Reviews

December 21st, 2005 by Walt

The American Mathematical Society produces, at great expense, Mathematical Reveiws, which provides a capsule summary of every paper published in a mathematics journal. Here’s something that just occurred to me today: does anyone actually use these reviews? I’ve used MR as a bibliography of papers by a particular author, but I can’t say I’ve ever read one of the reviews out of anything but idle curiousity. Does anyone else rely on this feature of MR?

Update. Apparently, it’s just me. I’ve been informed via email that everyone uses MR reviews.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Mathematical Reviews”

  1. gleuschk Says:
    December 22nd, 2005 at 6:24 am

    Sure, I use MathSciNet (the online version of MR) at least a couple of times a week.

  2. gleuschk Says:
    December 22nd, 2005 at 7:06 am

    (Actually, now that I think about it, that’s overzealous — in weeks where I’m actively researching something new, I use it constantly, while other months [when finals loom etc.] I don’t open it at all. It probably averages to slightly less than once a week over the long term.)

  3. Walt Says:
    December 23rd, 2005 at 8:20 am

    What do you use the reviews for?

  4. gleuschk Says:
    December 28th, 2005 at 6:31 pm

    To find out the content of the papers, mostly. Also to get a sense of whether they’re worth reading.

Leave a Reply