Journals that publish papers quickly

Question

I have written two papers in Mathematics and want to get them published. Can you suggest some journals that publish quickly? Besides, how can I know if a journal is well-regarded or not? I know there's something called an impact factor but what else? For example how is this journal? IJMRS - http://www.ijmrs.org/

Answer 1

Here are some things you need to ask yourself before publishing something. The reason I bring these up is that they show why you will need to discuss your work with someone who can endorse you for publishing on arXiv anyway.

1. Is it correct? If the mathematical content is is not correct, nobody will want to publish it.
2. Is it new? If the result has already been proven by someone else, it is unlikely that it can be published (there are a few exceptions to this, but I won't go into those here).
3. Is it interesting? This one is more of a subjective one, but if experts in the field will not find the result at least mildly interesting, then it will not be published.

Now to the reason you really need to speak with someone about the results: There is no way for you to answer these questions yourself.

You might be able to answer the first one yourself, but it is always good to get someone else to have a look and make sure you have not missed something.

The second one requires an intimate familiarity with the literature in the subject at hand, which is something you can only get after having worked on topics in the subject for many many years. A possible exception to this is if the result is a well-known open problem, but in that case I refer you back to the first question, because you will almost certainly not be correct.

The third one is probably an even trickier one. What makes a problem and its solution interesting is a very subjective matter, and for determining something like this it can actually make a difference who you are. If you are a well-known expert in a field, then pretty much anything you decide to work on will be seen as interesting, because people respect that you have a lot of experience and a good intuition for what areas of study might yield interesting results. If you are completely unknown (as you will be when you have not published anything before), then for what you are working on to be deemed interesting, it needs to be something that is clearly related to what others (ie, the experts) in the field are working on. The way to figure out what sort of questions are of interest is to read what sort of questions are being asked and answered in the various papers in the field. But an even faster way to find out if a specific questions and answer will be of interest is to ask various of the experts.

So this leads to the dilemma: If you are not associated with academia, so you don't know any experts well enough to trust them, how do you go about getting something published?

(Let me add here before I go on that these recommendations are only if you really do not feel you can trust the experts. Most experts will not plagiarize your work, even if you send them a full paper)

First, put up the paper on your own webpage or similar (while it might seem like a good idea to put it on Vixra to get a timestamp, that might backfire, as Vixra has a really bad reputation as a place people only put their work if it is no good).

Next, find out if the result is new. The good thing about this part is that just telling people what the result is will not tell them enough to plagiarize your work. A good way to do this can be to ask either here on or mathoverflow (if the result really is new or at least not so well-known as to be obviously not new, then it is certainly on-topic for MO), but be sure to be precise about what the result states.

Even if nobody using MO will be comfortable telling you the result is new, they might direct you to a person who is more familiar with the literature (this happened to me. I asked on MO, Jack Schmidt commented that he had not heard of the result before but said I should probably email Marty Isaacs, who in turn directed me to Thomas Keller and Mark Lewis, who both felt familiar enough with the literature to say that the result was new). As a possible further effect of asking on MO, you might be able to tell from the comments whether the result seems to be found interesting by people, which then also takes care of the third part.

After all the above, there is a good chance you now either feel confident sharing the paper with one or more of the people you have come into contact with, and those people can then help you submit to arXiv (If you are still feeling paranoid about sharing it, share it with more than one, as the odds of sharing with more than one who might plagiarize is even smaller, and those that do not want to plagiarize will then have a timestamp on their mail showing you got there first). Or you might feel confident enough in the paper that you submit it directly for publication (I recommend the first option).

To all the above should however be added that I agree with Gerry Myerson. If you are completely outside academia, there is a really good chance that what you have written is no good and nobody will want to plagiarize it (this is not because I know anything about you specifically, it is simple based on the huge number of rubbish papers and the low number of good ones written by people with no contact to academia).

As to a ranking of journals, there is http://www.austms.org.au/Rankings/AustMS_final_ranked.html which, even though it has some issues (as any such ranking invariably will), seems to be fairly widely used.