About Hokkaido Mathematical Journal

Hokkaido Mathematical Journal — Full Profile

Hokkaido Mathematical Journal is a general mathematics journal published in English by the Department of Mathematics, Hokkaido University, in Sapporo, Japan. Identified by the print ISSN 0385-4035 — and, as its own homepage now also records, by the online ISSN 2759-1441 — it has appeared under its present name since 1972, growing out of the mathematics series of the Journal of the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, whose run reaches back to 1930. The department publishes it three times a year, each annual volume running to nearly 500 pages and about twenty-five research papers, all of them refereed. It is distributed internationally through Project Euclid. This profile sets out the journal's lineage, its editorial arrangements, its contributor guidelines in practical detail, its access and copyright terms, and the citation picture given by OpenAlex and SCImago — with each figure attributed to its source.

Identity at a Glance

Lineage: A Department Journal With a Century-Scale Back Run

The journal's homepage tells its own history compactly. It grew out of Series I, Mathematics, published from 1930 to 1972 as part of the Journal of the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University; in 1972 the department started its own publication, which is now the Hokkaido Mathematical Journal. The formal history the department gives runs in three spans. From 1930 to 1948 the predecessor appeared as the Journal of the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido Imperial University, Series 1, Mathematics, from Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1930) to Vol. 11, No. 1 (September 1946). From 1948 to 1972 it appeared as the Journal of the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, Ser. 1, Mathematics, from Vol. 11, No. 2 (July 1948) to Vol. 22, Nos. 3/4 (May 1972). From 1972 to the present it is the Hokkaido Mathematical Journal, from Vol. 1, No. 1 onward. A librarian or a historian of Japanese mathematics should therefore treat the three titles as one continuous departmental series: citations to the wartime and post-war faculty journal and citations to the modern title belong to the same lineage, held together by the same Sapporo mathematics department.

That lineage is part of the journal's character. It is not a commercial title that can be bought, sold or rebranded; it is the house journal of a major national-university mathematics department, published as a service to the discipline. The department describes it in confident terms — "one of the world-leading mathematical academic journals available in English" is its own phrasing — and the submission figures it reports support a genuinely international authorship: for the past three years at the time of its statement, an average of some seventy papers a year were contributed, more than half of them from contributors in some fifteen different countries, with papers taken from mathematicians without regard to their fields, nationalities or affiliations. In principle, the department states, all contributions are refereed, and final decisions are made on the basis of the referees' reports.

Scope: General Pure and Applied Mathematics

The contributor guidelines state the purpose directly: the main purpose of the Hokkaido Mathematical Journal is to promote research activities in pure and applied mathematics by publishing original research papers. There is no narrower subject fence. The journal's archive, visible on Project Euclid and on the department's volume pages, ranges across algebra, geometry, analysis, differential equations, probability and mathematical physics, following the research strengths of its authors rather than a fixed set of sections. A paper is judged on its mathematics — originality, correctness and interest — with refereeing by specialists commissioned by the editors. That breadth puts the title in the family of general university mathematics journals, alongside its Japanese peers named in the final sections of this profile, rather than among specialist titles devoted to one branch of the subject.

Scale is worth noting for authors used to large commercial journals. An annual volume of nearly 500 pages carrying about twenty-five papers means papers are typically substantial — long proofs are not squeezed into a short page budget — and an acceptance places a paper in a volume that libraries have shelved, in print until recently and now electronically, for more than fifty years. The department notes that the journal is available on Project Euclid at about 200 libraries and research institutions in Japan and 400 universities and institutions abroad, and that the printed booklet was abolished from Vol. 53, No. 1 (2024), completing the move to electronic distribution.

Editorial Board

The journal's information page lists its editors and announces a board reform under which five distinguished mathematicians join the editorial board: Professor Charles M. Elliott (University of Warwick, United Kingdom), Professor Yoshikazu Giga (University of Tokyo, Japan), Professor Haruzo Hida (University of California, Los Angeles, United States), Professor Stanislaw Janeczko (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland) and Professor Tohru Ozawa (Waseda University, Japan). The working editors named on the same page are Toshiyuki Akita, Masanori Asakura, Hitoshi Furuhata, Takahiro Hasebe, Akihito Hora, Naohiko Kasuya, Masaharu Kobayashi, Hideo Kubo, Satoshi Masaki, Daisuke Matsushita, Tadahiro Miyao, Masaharu Nagayama, Takao Namiki and Yasuhide Numata, with Masanori Asakura marked as editor-in-chief. Correspondence for submission goes to the editorial office at the department, at the address the guidelines give as "journal at math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp".

How to Submit: The Contributor Guidelines in Practice

The guidelines are specific, and an author who follows them literally will meet most of the journal's requirements before review begins. Papers should be written in English. Authors are asked to provide an abstract, keywords and the 2020 Mathematics Subject Classification. The title page should carry the name, address, fax number and/or email address of the author to whom proofs should be sent and editorial correspondence addressed. Manuscripts are expected to be prepared with TeX; after acceptance, authors are asked to send the final text file of the manuscript, with the Mathematics Subject Classification data and a running title of within sixty characters, to the editorial office email address given above. References to articles and books should be arranged alphabetically, in the styles illustrated in the guidelines.

On submission mechanics, the guidelines still carry the older instruction that two copies of each paper should be sent to the editor-in-chief, whose address appears on the inside front cover, alongside the now-standard electronic route: manuscripts can also be submitted electronically to the editorial office, and the journal strongly recommends that a PDF file of the manuscript be submitted along with a TeX source file that can readily be compiled. In practice the electronic route is the one a distant author will use. Submission implies the author's assurance that the paper has not been published and is not submitted for publication elsewhere. Authors receive only one set of proofs for correction, and excessive alterations at proof stage will be charged to the author — a standard clause worth remembering before submitting a still-fluid draft.

Copyright and Author Rights

The copyright terms are those of a traditional department journal, with an unusually explicit statement of what authors keep. Submission implies agreement that, if and when the manuscript is accepted, copyright transfers to the publisher — the Department of Mathematics, Hokkaido University — covering reproduction and distribution by printing, reprinting or any other method the publisher deems appropriate, including electronic means, photographic reproduction, microfilm and translations. Against that transfer, the guidelines reserve two rights to authors in terms. First, authors may use all or part of the manuscript in future works of their own — lectures, lecture notes, press releases, reviews, PhD theses, textbooks or reprint books. Second, after publication authors may keep the manuscript, in its published form, on any preprint server, their own websites or any institutional repository, for research, education and other academic purposes, provided they state that it was published in the Hokkaido Mathematical Journal and place the copyright notice in proper form on all copies. Authors should read those reserved rights carefully: they are broader than the self-archiving terms of many comparable journals, and they are granted by the guidelines themselves rather than needing separate permission.

No article processing charge or page charge is stated in the contributor guidelines or on the journal homepage consulted for this profile; the fee position is therefore recorded here as could not be verified from the journal's own published information, and an author for whom a charge would matter should confirm the position with the editorial office when submitting. Access for readers runs principally through Project Euclid and subscribing libraries; the journal is not an open access title, and a DOAJ listing could not be verified — the DOAJ search API returned no record for its print ISSN at the time of checking, which is the expected position for a subscription journal of this kind.

Reading the Archive: What a Recent Issue Contains

A single issue shows the journal's breadth better than any scope statement. Volume 52, No. 2 (June 2023), as listed on Project Euclid, opens with work by Magdalena Lampa-Baczyńska and Daniel Wójcik on arrangements of lines and the Pappus theorem, in combinatorial geometry; continues with Kunio Hidano and Kazuyoshi Yokoyama on global existence for quasi-linear wave equations under the null condition, in partial differential equations; then Koichiro Sawada on hyperbolic curves and configuration spaces in algebraic geometry; J. M. Aldaz on metric measure spaces and Besicovitch covering properties in analysis; Tomoya Kato and Naoto Shida on bilinear pseudo-differential operators; Jakub Kabat on supersolvable line arrangements; Deepak Bansal and Ravinder Krishna Raina on analytic and univalent functions in complex analysis; and Yoshihiro Mizuta and Tetsu Shimomura on Hardy–Sobolev inequalities for double-phase functionals. Eight papers, eight distinct territories of mathematics, each carrying its Mathematics Subject Classification codes in the Project Euclid listing, from 14N20 and 52C35 through 35L52 to 30C45 and 46E30.

The same pattern holds further back. Volume 45, No. 1 (February 2016) ranges from Akira Ishii and Kazushi Ueda on dimer models and toric Calabi–Yau threefolds, through Igor Nikolaev on complex and real multiplication, Patrick Keef on purity and Ulm subgroups in abelian groups, Akihide Hanaki and Mitsugu Hirasaka on zeta functions of association schemes, to Raimundas Vidūnas on Heun equations and work on nonlinear difference equations and piecewise-smooth bifurcations. Two issues, fifteen years of the journal's modern run apart in style but not in kind: the journal does not chase a theme, it collects sound mathematics across the whole subject, which is precisely what a general department journal is for — and why its volumes reward browsing by mathematicians whose own field is only one of the many represented between its covers.

Metrics and How to Read Them

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to the source record for ISSN 0385-4035 (source S113557333, held under the Department of Mathematics, Hokkaido University), reported at the time of checking for this profile, in October 2026: 1,826 works, 12,803 citations, an h-index of 45, an i10-index of 324 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.51. SCImago, working from Scopus data, presents a smaller, Scopus-bounded picture: its Japan mathematics ranking shows the journal with an SJR of 0.209 in the fourth quartile (Q4) of the Mathematics (miscellaneous) category and an h-index of 32 — the same h-index figure carried on the earlier version of this JournalsWorld record — with twelve documents in the 2025 year shown. The gap between an OpenAlex h-index of 45 and a SCImago h-index of 32 is a coverage effect, not a contradiction: OpenAlex draws on a wider set of citing sources over the journal's full run, while SCImago counts only Scopus-indexed citations within its own window. Anyone quoting a figure for this journal should name the database it came from, as this profile does.

Interpretation matters more than the raw numbers. A general mathematics journal of this age accumulates citations slowly and durably: a strong paper in algebra or analysis may gather citations over decades, which is exactly the pattern a four-figure total works count and a five-figure citation count describe. The journal's standing is that of a respected national-university title — below the flagship society journals in citation density, firmly established in the international library circuit, and valued by authors who want a refereed, permanent, widely held home for a substantial piece of mathematics.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Read

The natural author is a mathematician with a complete, original research paper — in any field of pure or applied mathematics — that merits a full-length treatment and a permanent journal home, and who is content with the pace of a thrice-yearly department journal. Researchers at institutions without a strong local journal tradition, and authors whose work follows the strengths of the Hokkaido department and its board, have historically found the journal receptive; the reported submission flow, roughly seventy papers a year from some fifteen countries, indicates how international that authorship already is. Work that needs rapid turnaround, or that belongs to a narrow specialist community with its own flagship title, may fit better elsewhere. Readers are research mathematicians and university libraries worldwide: the Project Euclid presence at hundreds of institutions is the channel through which most outside readers will meet the journal.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

Within Japan, the closest comparators are the other long-running university and society mathematics journals: the Tohoku Mathematical Journal, the Kodai Mathematical Journal, the Osaka Journal of Mathematics, the Kyoto Journal of Mathematics and the Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan — all of which appear alongside this title in SCImago's Japan mathematics listings. Each has its own publisher, board, submission route and access model, which should be checked on its own site. The Hokkaido Mathematical Journal's distinguishing marks in that company are its continuous departmental lineage back to 1930, its reserved-rights copyright terms for authors, and its steady thrice-yearly rhythm from Sapporo.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print 0385-4035; the journal homepage also records an online ISSN, 2759-1441.

Who publishes it? The Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.

How old is it? Under its present title since 1972; its predecessor series in the Journal of the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, runs back to 1930.

How often does it appear? Three times a year; an annual volume totals nearly 500 pages and about twenty-five papers.

Who is editor-in-chief? Masanori Asakura, marked as editor-in-chief on the journal's information page, working with a board that includes internationally known mathematicians from Warwick, Tokyo, UCLA, Warsaw and Waseda.

How do I submit? Electronically to the editorial office ("journal at math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp"), with a PDF and a compilable TeX source strongly recommended; papers in English, with abstract, keywords and 2020 MSC, prepared in TeX.

What are its metrics? At checking time, OpenAlex showed 1,826 works, 12,803 citations and an h-index of 45; SCImago showed SJR 0.209, Q4 and an h-index of 32 from Scopus data.

Does it charge authors? No charge is stated in the guidelines or homepage consulted; the position is recorded here as could not be verified, so confirm with the editorial office if it matters to you. One firm cost clause exists: excessive alterations at proof stage are charged to the author.

Sources and Verification

This profile was built from the journal's official homepage and information page at Hokkaido University (history, frequency, submission volume, board, contributor guidelines, copyright terms and ISSNs), the SCImago Japan mathematics ranking derived from Scopus data, OpenAlex resolved through its ISSN endpoint, and the DOAJ search API queried on the print ISSN. Any figure that could not be verified from a source actually consulted is not stated as fact in this profile.