Notices of the American Mathematical Society
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Dear Early Career
How do you decide where to submit a research paper?
—Publisher
Dear Publisher,
This is a good question! If your work is collaborative, it is essential to ask collaborators how ambitious they want to be in selecting a journal to submit to. That said, I’d encourage you to develop a rather detached view of the role of journals in terms of judging the quality of your own work. When you apply for (postdoc or tenure-track) academic positions, letters of recommendation will likely play a larger role than where your papers are published. I’d also recommend coming up with a backup journal at the time of submission: This can be helpful in case you get a rejection with a referee report that you strongly disagree with—having a backup plan laid out in advance can prevent you (or a collaborator) from making an emotional decision about the future of the paper.
There are journals that will publish articles in all mathematical subfields, while others are more specialized. Consider prioritizing a journal with an editor in your field over the generality of the journal. While several high-profile journals will publish articles across mathematical disciplines, it is not uniformly the case that “general” journals are considered better than subfield specific journals. (Since I’ll be naming some journals, I’ll give the disclaimer that every subfield of math evaluates journals differently, and my biases come from working largely in pure harmonic analysis.) For instance, Analysis and PDE is a specialized journal which aims to publish excellent contributions to analysis, and a paper submitted there would have to excite referees more than, say, a submission to the Pacific Journal of Math, or the Michigan Journal of Math, even though the latter two are well-regarded general journals. Such examples occur in all subfields of mathematics. In either case, I only submit to journals that have an editor in my field (and I often look more specifically for editors who I think might have some appreciation for the paper because of their prior work).
When writing a paper, often a few previous works are significant influences: for instance, we might answer a question (or be attempting to answer a question) raised in a previous paper, or we might be building upon techniques pioneered in a previous paper. I quite like to submit to the journals in which those papers appeared when that feels appropriate. An exception to this is when those papers appeared in “top top journals” such as the Annals of Math, Acta Math, Invent. Math, or the Journal of the AMS.Footnote1 For a paper to have a good chance of being accepted for publication in a “top top journal,” it should be a really exciting development about which the referees are extremely enthusiastic, so if my paper is an application of ideas developed in a “top top journal” paper to a problem that I find interesting, then I wouldn’t necessarily think it would be appropriate to send to a “top top journal.” If, however, your work is creating excitement in your area, then submitting to one of the top-tier journalsFootnote2 could be worthwhile. It takes a bit of practice to gauge your work in this regard, and talking to mentors is often a good idea.
Personally, I include Geometric and Functional Analysis to this list. Some people might also include Duke Math Journal, and most might include Publications Mathématiques de l’IHE’S, as well as other journals.
Journal of the European Mathematical Society, Advances in Math, and Crelle’s Journal would also all be examples of “prestigious” journals in addition to those mentioned above, and (for example) a geometer would likely add the Journal of Differential Geometry, and Geometry and Topology, as well as other journals.
The journey your manuscript goes on after it is submitted is out of your control. Out of the set of all possible reviewers for your paper in the world, most likely some of them will accept the paper, and some won’t. A great mathematician once told me that they knew they were really onto something if a paper got rejected three times, so don’t spend too much time worrying about what might happen and get submitting!
—Early Career editors
Have a question that you think would fit into our Dear Early Career column? Submit it to Taylor.2952@osu.edu or bjaye3@gatech.edu with the subject Early Career.