Over 30,000 mathematicians worldwide read the Notices

For Notices Authors

The Notices welcomes unsolicited manuscripts, Letters to the Editor, and comments and suggestions from readers.

The following information for Notices authors appears each year in the June/July issue. Visit the Contact the Notices page for contact details.

Information for Notices Authors

The Notices welcomes unsolicited articles for consideration for publication, as well as proposals for such articles. The following provides general guidelines for writing Notices articles and preparing them for submission.

Notices readership

The Notices goes to over 33,000 subscribers worldwide, of whom about 25,000 are in North America. Approximately 8,000 of the 25,000 in North America are graduate students who have completed at least one year of graduate school. All readers may be assumed to be interested in mathematics research, but they are not all active researchers.

Notices feature articles

Feature articles may address mathematics, mathematical news and developments, mathematics history, issues affecting the profession, mathematics education at any level, the AMS and its activities, and other such topics of interest to Notices readers. Each article is expected to have a large target audience of readers, perhaps 5,000 of the 30,000 subscribers. Authors must therefore write their articles for nonexperts rather than for experts or would-be experts. In particular, the mathematics articles in the Notices are expository. The language of the Notices is English.

Most feature articles, including those on mathematics, are expected to be of long-term value and should be written as such. Ideally each article should put its topic in a context, providing some history and other orientation for the reader, and, as necessary, relating the subject matter to things that readers are likely to understand. In most cases, articles should progress to dealing with contemporary matters, not giving only historical material. The articles that are received the best by readers tend to relate different areas of mathematics to each other.

By design the Notices is partly magazine and partly journal, and authors' expository styles should take this into account. For example, many readers want to understand the mathematics articles without undue effort and without consulting other sources.

Mathematics feature articles in the Notices are normally six to nine pages, sometimes a little longer. Shorter articles are more likely to be read fully than are longer articles. The first page is 400 or 500 words, and subsequent pages are about 800 words. From this one should subtract an allowance for figures, photos, and other llustrations, and an appropriate allowance for any displayed equations and any bibliography.

Form of articles. Except with very short articles, authors are encouraged to use section headings and subsection headings to help orient readers. Normally there is no section heading at the beginning of an article. Despite the encouraged use of internal headings, the assigning of numbers to sections and subsections is not permitted in any article.

The bibliography should be kept short. In the case of mathematics articles, bibliographies are normally limited to about ten items and should consist primarily of entries like books in which one may do further reading. To help readers who might want lists of recent literature, an author might include a small number of recent publications with good bibliographies.

Editing process. Most articles that are destined to be accepted undergo an intensive editing process. The purposes of this process are to ensure that the target audience is as large as practicable, that the content of the article is clear and unambiguous, and that the article is relatively easy to read. Usually it is the members of the editorial board who are involved in this process. Sometimes outside referees are consulted.

Preparation of articles for submission. The preferred form for submitted articles is as electronic files. Authors who cannot send articles electronically may send the articles by fax or by postal mail.

Articles with a significant number of mathematical symbols are best prepared in TeX, LaTeX, or AMS-TeX.  There is no style file for distribution to authors, but upon request, the editor can make available a simple TeX header that simulates the Notices two-column format. Since the Notices is set in narrow columns, keeping displayed formulas relatively short helps to minimize adjustments during the production process; avoiding nonstandard supplementary files and complex sequences of definitions also helps. For the handling of figures and other illustrations, please consult the editor.

Articles without a significant number of mathematical symbols may be prepared as text files or in Microsoft Word. In the case of files prepared in Microsoft Word, it is advisable to send both the source Word file and a PDF.

Instructions for Authors of "WHAT IS...?" Columns

The purpose of the "WHAT IS...?" column is to provide brief, nontechnical descriptions of mathematical objects in use in current research. The target audience for the columns is first-year graduate students.

Each "WHAT IS...?" column provides an expository description of a single mathematical object being used in contemporary research. Thus "WHAT IS M-Theory?" would be too broad, but "WHAT IS a Brane?" would be appropriate; ideally, "WHAT IS a Brane?" would give a flavor of what M-theory is.

The writing should be nontechnical and informal. Narrative description conveying main ideas should be favored over notation-heavy precision.

There is a strict limit of two Notices pages (1,400 words with no picture, or 1,200 words with one picture). A list of "Further Reading" should contain no more than three references. Inquiries and comments about the "WHAT IS...?" column are welcome and may be sent to notices-whatis@ ams.org.