About Journal for Geometry and Graphics

Journal for Geometry and Graphics — Journal Profile

The Journal for Geometry and Graphics is a specialist mathematics journal devoted to geometry in its classical, descriptive, computational and applied forms, and to the graphical methods through which geometric ideas are constructed, visualised and taught. It is published by Heldermann Verlag in Germany and is identified by a single ISSN, 1433-8157. Few journals anywhere keep descriptive geometry — the discipline founded on Gaspard Monge's programme of representing three-dimensional objects exactly in two dimensions — at the centre of a modern research agenda, and fewer still combine it with kinematics, computer graphics and the teaching of engineering drawing. That combination is this journal's defining character, and it explains both its loyal specialist readership and its modest scale: recent volumes contain roughly twenty papers a year, each worked out in the careful constructive style the field expects.

Identity and History

The journal was created in 1996 by the Austrian geometer Hellmuth Stachel, professor of geometry at the Vienna University of Technology, who served it as editor-in-chief from its foundation. The first issue appeared in 1997, and the journal's publication coverage in indexing records runs from 1997 onward. Stachel is a leading figure in classical and descriptive geometry, kinematics and the theory of mechanisms, and computer-aided design, and the journal's scope closely reflects those interests. The year 2022 brought a telling coincidence that the journal marked with a special issue: the 25th anniversary of the publication of its first issue, the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the International Society for Geometry and Graphics (ISGG), and Stachel's 80th birthday. The special issue, introduced by the journal's editorial board together with the officers of the ISGG, gathered personal memories and scientific contributions from authors across the society's three world regions — Asia, Australia and Oceania; Europe, the Near East and Africa; and North and South America. The episode underlines how closely the journal is woven into the ISGG community: it functions in large part as the society's intellectual home in print, even though it is published commercially by Heldermann Verlag, a German publishing house long known for mathematics journals and lecture-note series.

The volume sequence visible in the publisher's article archive confirms steady, unhurried continuity: volume 21 appeared in 2017, volume 22 in 2018, volume 23 in 2019 and volume 27 in 2023, each volume appearing in two numbered issues. A journal that reaches its twenty-seventh volume without changing its title, its ISSN or its publisher is a stable object in the scholarly record, and libraries can catalogue it with confidence.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal publishes research in geometry and in the graphical representation of geometric objects and processes. Papers in recent volumes illustrate the breadth concretely. A 2018 paper worked through the combinatorics of triangulated polyhedra, classifying triangulations by their degree sequences and the flip operations that connect them — pure discrete geometry with a constructive flavour. A 2017 paper located the vertex positions of the generalised orthocentre of a triangle and followed a related elliptic curve, synthetic classical geometry carried out with modern care. A 2019 paper stepped into the classroom, describing a teaching ecosystem for engineering graphics built on a deeper-learning cycle model, with massive open online courses and small private online courses compared as delivery environments. A 2023 paper developed non-Euclidean descriptive geometry for engineering and the applied visual arts, asking what happens to projection when light rays do not travel straight or the projection screen is curved, with consequences for optics and virtual reality. Descriptive geometry in the traditional sense — axonometry, perspective, projections and their exact construction rules — remains a core topic, as does kinematics, the geometry of motion that underlies mechanism design and robotics.

Prospective authors should read that list as a boundary as well as an invitation. The journal welcomes geometry done in many styles — synthetic, analytic, discrete, differential and computational — and graphics understood as a mathematical activity: computer graphics with genuine geometric content, computer-aided geometric design, visualisation grounded in projection theory, and the didactics of geometry and engineering drawing. It is not a general mathematics journal, and papers whose geometry is incidental, or whose graphics content is purely a software demonstration without geometric substance, belong elsewhere. Manuscripts are typically classified with Mathematics Subject Classification codes in the 51 range (geometry), as the published articles show — for example 51N05 for descriptive geometry topics.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

Heldermann Verlag is a small, long-established German mathematics publisher. Its model is the traditional one: the journal is sold by subscription, articles carry the publisher's copyright line — the article files in its archive are headed with the ISSN and the Heldermann imprint — and the archive of article PDFs is hosted on the publisher's own site. The journal was founded and long led by Hellmuth Stachel; an anniversary account published in 2022 describes him as the journal's founder and former editor-in-chief, with the special issue of that year launched by the then-current editor-in-chief together with the ISGG officers. Because the publisher's web pages for the journal have been reorganised over time, the current editorial roster and the current submission address could not be verified from a live publisher page at the time of checking; authors should confirm the serving editor and the manuscript route through the Heldermann Verlag site or the ISGG before submitting, rather than relying on addresses printed in older articles.

Peer Review, Ethics and Licensing

The journal operates as a conventional peer-reviewed mathematics journal: submitted manuscripts are assessed by specialists, and the published record — carefully refereed-looking constructive papers with full proofs — is consistent with that model. Detailed public statements on review timelines, ethics policies, plagiarism screening and licensing terms are not published on a dedicated journal page that could be verified at checking time, so those specifics are recorded here as could not be verified rather than guessed. The article files examined carry a standard publisher copyright notice for the years in which they appeared; one 2023 article is headed as licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by its authors, which shows that licensing can vary by article and period, and authors should confirm the licence that will apply to their own paper at acceptance. Article processing charges are not published on any page verified for this profile; the journal's historic model is subscription-based, and any current fee position should be confirmed with the publisher directly.

Metrics and What They Mean

Readers should interpret this journal's metrics in the context of a very small, very specialised field. In the SCImago Journal Rank listing for Geometry and Topology, the journal appears with an SJR of 0.173 and a Q4 position in the most recent ranking table retrieved, with an h-index of 21; an earlier-year table in the same listing shows the same h-index of 21, eleven documents in the reference year, 58 documents over three years and citations per document (two years) of 0.29. The h-index of 21 means that 21 of the journal's papers have each been cited at least 21 times — a respectable accumulation for a title publishing about twenty papers a year in a niche where citation densities are naturally low. An attempt to resolve the journal in OpenAlex through its ISSN endpoint returned no source record, and a follow-up query was rate-limited, so OpenAlex works and citation totals for this title are recorded as could not be verified. No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is claimed for this journal in any source consulted, and none should be inferred from the SJR figures above: SJR and the Impact Factor are different measures built on different databases. The honest summary is that this is a low-volume, long-lived specialist journal whose influence is concentrated inside the geometry-and-graphics community rather than spread across mathematics at large.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's presence in the SCImago listing is itself evidence of coverage in Scopus, because SCImago is built entirely on Scopus data; the thin bibliographic record from which this profile was expanded likewise reported Scopus-style coverage from 1997 onward. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by the journal's ISSN returned no record at the time of checking, which is expected for a subscription title and should not be read as a quality judgement. Listings in mathematical reviewing services could not be verified from a primary page at checking time and are therefore not asserted here. For discoverability in practice, the publisher's open article archive matters most: individual article PDFs are reachable on the Heldermann site and are crawled by scholarly search engines, so a paper's title and authors are readily findable even though the journal itself is not open access.

How to Submit

Because the publisher's journal pages have moved over the years, the safest submission route is to start from the Heldermann Verlag website and the journal's current article archive, confirm the serving editor and any instructions for authors there, and only then prepare the manuscript. In practical terms: write in the journal's established style — a clearly stated geometric problem, exact constructions or proofs, well-drawn figures, MSC 2020 codes and a reference list anchored in the geometry literature; expect a small-field refereeing process in which the referee may well be one of a handful of world specialists in your exact topic; and confirm copyright, licensing and any charges with the publisher at submission, since those terms are not published in a verifiable public page. Authors needing a rapid decision or an open-access outlet with a formal licence should weigh those needs honestly, because this journal offers neither speed nor a standard open licence as its selling points — it offers the right audience.

Who Reads It and Who Should Publish Here

The readership is the international geometry-and-graphics community: university geometers, researchers in kinematics and mechanism theory, computer-graphics researchers with mathematical interests, and lecturers who teach descriptive geometry and engineering drawing, many of them connected through the ISGG and its conferences. Publish here when your contribution is a genuine advance in geometry or in graphical method and you want it read, slowly and carefully, by exactly the people who will build on it. A classical synthetic result, a new construction, a kinematic insight or a well-evaluated study of geometry teaching all fit. Do not choose this journal to chase metric thresholds: its quartile is Q4 and its citation window is long. Choose it for fit, permanence and community.

Similar and Sibling Journals

Authors comparing outlets in the same territory should look at the Journal of Geometry (differential and classical geometry), KoG — the journal of the Croatian Society for Geometry and Graphics, a close community sibling — the Journal of Industrial Design and Engineering Graphics, Geometriae Dedicata for broader geometry, and Computer Aided Geometric Design or Graphical Models when the computational and graphics side dominates. Discrete and Computational Geometry serves the discrete end of the field at a larger scale. Each differs in emphasis; the Journal for Geometry and Graphics is the one that keeps descriptive geometry and graphics as first-class citizens alongside pure geometry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the Journal for Geometry and Graphics? The journal carries a single ISSN, 1433-8157, as shown on its published articles and in its bibliographic record.

Who publishes the journal? Heldermann Verlag of Germany. The journal was created in 1996 by Hellmuth Stachel of the Vienna University of Technology, and its first issue appeared in 1997.

Is the journal connected to a learned society? It is closely associated with the International Society for Geometry and Graphics (ISGG); the journal's 25th-anniversary special issue in 2022 was produced with the society's officers and authors from all its world regions.

What subjects does it cover? Geometry in all its forms — classical, descriptive, discrete, differential and computational — together with kinematics, computer graphics with geometric content, engineering graphics and the teaching of geometry and drawing.

What are its citation metrics? SCImago lists the journal in Geometry and Topology at Q4 with an SJR of 0.173 in the most recent table retrieved and an h-index of 21. OpenAlex figures could not be verified at checking time.

Is it open access or listed in DOAJ? It is a subscription journal; a DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record at checking time. Individual article PDFs are nevertheless reachable in the publisher's online archive.

Does it charge authors? No article processing charge is published on any page verified for this profile; the fee position could not be verified and should be confirmed with Heldermann Verlag before submission.

How often does it appear? The volumes examined (2017–2023) each appeared in two numbered issues.

Article Types and the Character of the Papers

The journal publishes full research articles as its staple, and the special-issue tradition visible in 2022 shows it also gives room to editorial and commemorative material when the community's history warrants it. Research papers share recognisable habits across the decades. They state a geometric situation precisely, often with a figure that carries real information rather than decoration; they proceed by construction, computation or proof in proportions suited to the problem; and they close by placing the result in a literature that can reach back a century or more, because in classical geometry a result from 1910 may still be the live state of the art. Papers in kinematics connect that classical inheritance to mechanism science, where a theorem about instantaneous motion can inform the design of linkages and robots. Papers on teaching treat the geometry classroom itself as the object of study, reporting course designs and learning environments — the 2019 engineering-graphics study, for instance, compared large open online cohorts numbering in the tens of thousands with small private online classes of a few hundred students, and analysed both through a staged learning-cycle model. This mixture — pure geometry, applied geometry and geometry education between the same covers — is unusual in mathematics publishing, where education papers are usually hived off to separate outlets. Here the mixture is deliberate: the ISGG community has always held that how geometry is drawn and taught is part of geometry itself.

How This Profile Was Verified

This profile is anchored on the journal's live bibliographic record (title, slug and ISSN 1433-8157) and built from sources fetched directly during preparation: article files in the publisher's own archive on the Heldermann site, which confirm the ISSN, the publisher's imprint, the volume-and-issue pattern and the subject matter of individual papers; the published introduction to the journal's 25th-anniversary special issue, which records the 1997 first issue, the ISGG anniversary and Hellmuth Stachel's founding role; biographical material on Stachel recording that he created the journal in 1996; the SCImago listing for the title; and a Directory of Open Access Journals search by ISSN, which returned no record. Where a fact could not be verified from such a source — the current editorial roster, detailed ethics and licensing statements, fee policy and OpenAlex totals — this profile says so openly instead of filling the gap with plausible detail, and readers should treat the publisher's current pages as the authority for anything time-sensitive.

A final practical note for librarians and bibliographers: because the title begins with the generic word "Journal", catalogue searches should always be run with the ISSN 1433-8157 rather than the title alone, which also cleanly separates this title from the several other geometry-and-graphics periodicals with similar names that appear in the Similar Journals section above. The title has never changed, no predecessor or successor title exists in the record consulted, and the single-ISSN identity makes holdings straightforward to maintain across the whole run from 1997 to the present.