Je sème à tout vent
En décembre dernier, j’ai écrit sur les demandes spam d’admission aux études supérieures dans lesquelles un étudiant envoie un courriel à un membre de la faculté lui demandant travailler sous sa direction. Les lettres louent toujours les recherches du récipiendaire du courriel, faisant ainsi preuve de la méconnaissance des dites recherches.
As an editor (not so much here, though it happens, but mainly as articles editor for Crux Mathematicorum I see a lot of another flavor of spam: the paper submitted to a totally inappropriate journal. I do not speak here of a paper that might be appropriate if it was at a slightly higher level: that’s a subjective matter, and any proud author might rate their paper a little more highly than the referee does. And I’m not even talking about the truly fractoceramic submissions, the ones purporting to square the circle (and prove the Riemann conjecture for dessert) via two pages of metaphysical bafflegab and a few crudely-typeset equations.
At Crux, there’s also a string of first efforts from high school students. Many of these would be worthy of praise in a school science fair, but don’t have sufficient novelty or depth for general publication. This is probably a specific quirk of Crux: it’s the first mathematical periodical that many budding mathematicians learn about, and we’re proud of that. Moreover, we do expect the articles we publish to be accessible to the brightest high school students–but that’s not our only criterion! I don’t imagine that the CJM or Annals have this problem often.
Today I’m thinking of the papers that quite possibly have a modest home waiting for them somewhere, but whose authors seem unaware that not all math journals are isomorphic. Just this week a submission to Crux arrived: I won’t mention the title, or even the precise topic, to spare the author’s blushes, but it was an applied math paper most unlikely to interest the typical Crux reader (whom we understand to be a devotee of math puzzles or contest problems.) While it was outside my area of expertise, it seemed to be quite possibly correct and possibly even of some value. Moreover, it had a list of references to articles in various journals. In short, it was clear that the author knew that the world contains numerous math journals. So how did they end up sending it to Crux?
J’ose supposer que la facilité du processus de soumission à l’ère d’Internet fait en sorte que les auteurs pensent que c’est plus facile de soumettre de façon aléatoire que de lire les Notes aux auteurs (ou même quelques articles) pour savoir le type d’article que la revue publie normalement. Malheureusement, ceci n’est pas une bonne idée. Au cours des vingt dernières années, un nombre horrifiant des revues prédatrices avec des normes mesurées par des chiffres imaginaires ont vu le jour; et les soumissions stochastiques, telles que celle d’un article sur les mathématiques appliquées à une revue de résolution de problèmes, ne seront fort probablement pas logées dans un bon foyer, ou seront publiées dans une revue qui ne fera pas l’honneur à son auteur.
