The n-Category Café

Terry Tao has a habit of saying every journal he submits papers to, when writing about his preprints on his blog.

Interesting; I wonder why. Of course, Terry Tao is a very special case. I suspect rejection for him is a much less common occurrence than for most of us.

Sort of like my wife’s dad used to say: “I like spinach — just not enough to eat it”.

The word typically in their instructions is frustratingly vague. Whenever I read a journal’s “About Us” or “Aims and Scope”, I wonder how much of it represents a well-thought-out consensus of the leadership and how much was just thrown in by one person and then overlooked because it resembled every other “About Us” or “Aims and Scope” webpage.

The line between new and old can get contentious, and edicts set out in policy can turn out more fluid in practice. There’s a moderately famous bit of lore that Physical Review Letters rejected the first paper about lasers because they thought it was just another maser paper. Like much physics lore, this might even be halfway true. The editor of PRL, Samuel Goudsmit, actually declared a subject non grata three times in its first decade: masers in 1959, the Mössbauer effect in 1960 and gauge theories in 1965. In all these cases, the motivation was that too many mediocre, trend-following papers were being received, and so new ones would only be considered if they stuck to a high standard of concreteness (“if they propose a genuinely new concept which makes possible the correlation of previously unrelated data”). Later, in 1973, Goudsmit wrote that the Physical Review journals were receiving “papers about fundamental theories” for which it was impossible to find willing reviewers. These submissions, he noted, showed “a paucity of mathematics as compared to wordage” and refashioned old theories without predicting new experimental consequences. He then gave the genre a polite brush-off:

Some of these papers may have an important bearing on the philosophy of physics. However, since there exist excellent journals publishing articles on the foundations and on the philosophy of science, we shall no longer accept papers of this type for the Physical Review.

Still, the prohibition on foundational matters was not absolute, and for example, Physical Review D would accept a paper by d’Espagnat on Bell inequalities the following year.

I wonder how much prohibitions on new proofs of old theorems contribute to the phenomenon that Davis and Hersh noted in their essay “The Ideal Mathematician”. The writings of such an individual

follow an unbreakable convention: to conceal any sign that the author or the intended reader is a human being.

L Spice wrote:

Perhaps, in fairness to the journal and its editors, it is important to note that “we don’t publish new proofs of known results” is not the same as “we don’t appreciate new proofs of known results.”

I agree, Loren, that they’re not the same. Plus, as I said, the journal’s declaration is that it “does not typically publish new proofs of known results” (my emphasis) — it’s not a hard and fast rule. And moreover, as Blake mentioned, the policies of an institution don’t always faithfully reflect the preferences of the human beings behind it (for all sorts of reasons, but principally that everyone’s busy).

Nevertheless, John’s spinach anecdote is spot on. Claims to appreciate X or find Y important are unconvincing if you don’t actually take action towards X or Y. (If I claim climate change is important to me, but e.g. vote for a political party with regressive environmental policies, then you can question how genuine my claim really is.) So actually, when you write this —

there are plenty of journals that don’t publish expository papers, and I think few believe that means that their editors don’t believe in the values of expository papers

— I kind of know what you mean (institutional inertia etc.), but at the same time I might count myself as one of your “few”. Any journal editor who really believes in the value of expository papers — anyone who’s reached the conclusions that mathematics needs more expository writing, that expository writing is undervalued in terms of prestige and careers, and that there’s a shortage of good venues for publishing expository pieces — would make the small effort required to start a discussion of their journal’s policy. Otherwise it’s only “belief” in the weak sense of lip service, not “belief” that’s strong enough to actually cause action. It’s like John’s wife’s dad’s attitude to spinach.