[Math] Missing citations of “to appear” papers on MathSciNet

citationsjournalsmathscinet

Recently, looking at my author profile on MathSciNet (Am I a narcissist?), I saw that my citations counter is lower than what I expected. After a while, I realized what the problem is:

Many of my papers are cited (both by myself alone, by me plus some coauthors, or by other authors) as

"Authors names, Article title, Journal, (to appear)"

because they were accepted but not yet published at the time.
Unfortunately MathSciNet does not count those citations.

Do you know how it is possible to fix this problem?
Have any of you had the same problem?

Is there any official email address/website for suggesting corrections to MR citations? (quoting Sam Hopkins)

I guess it is a matter of contact in some way the MathSciNet's reviewers. I tried MathSciNet "Support Mail", but I guess it is only for browser/connection related problems, in fact I got no answers.

Thank you very much for any suggestion.

EDITs:

  • I found that when the "to appear" papers are cited as

"Authors names, Article title, Journal (year) (in press)"

then they are correctly handled by MathSciNet citations database. Thus I suggest to do so to everyone who has to cite a "to appear" paper.

  • This question is "on hold" since somebody thinks it is off-topic. I can agree that it is quite different from the typical MO questions. However, it seems to me that this kind of problem can interest many researchers, so I will wait at least until some satisfactory answer before close it.

Best Answer

For citations from a reference list at the end of an article, we try to match items in the list to items already in the Math Reviews database. If a paper is "to appear" at the time it is cited, there is probably nothing in the database to match it to. We are currently developing a new matching program, one that should be better at matching papers that were cited as “to appear” but are now in the database. Once that is finished (and tested), it will replace the current method. We will also be running it regularly, so that we can find more matches of this type.

More information about citations in MathSciNet is available online at http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/help/citation_database_help_full.html#matched

If you have questions about the content of MathSciNet, including missed citations, you should write to mathrev@ams.org. Questions about the functioning of the site, such as problems with connectivity or math not rendering properly, you should write to msn-support@ams.org. If you are not sure which address to use, just pick one. The people who read the messages are good at triage. Or you can write to me: egd@ams.org.

There is another type of citation in MathSciNet: from the body of a review of another paper. These can be particularly interesting, because a third party has decided that the two papers are related.