Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics

About Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics

Overview

The Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics — commonly cited as J. Comput. Appl. Math. — is a peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to computational and applied mathematics, published by Elsevier. It has appeared continuously since 1975 and is currently issued on a biweekly schedule (about 24 issues per year), making it one of the highest-volume specialist journals in numerical and applied mathematics.

The journal's core interest is work that describes and analyzes new computational techniques for solving scientific or engineering problems. It also welcomes improved analysis — including assessments of effectiveness and applicability — of existing methods and algorithms. A distinctive editorial demand is that claims of computational efficiency (convergence, stability, accuracy and the like) must be proved and illustrated with nontrivial numerical examples; manuscripts that merely present variants of existing methods without significant new computational properties are not of interest.

By the standard metrics displayed on the publisher's journal page (retrieved 2026-10-11), the journal carries a CiteScore of 5.2 and a Journal Impact Factor of 2.4. Its Wikipedia entry, citing Journal Citation Reports, reports an impact factor of 2.6 for 2024 — metric values move between releases, so readers should check the current edition of each source. OpenAlex records roughly 18,000 works and 380,000 citations for the journal with an h-index of 178 (retrieved 2026-10-11; these tallies change as the database is updated). SCImago-derived data places it in the second quartile (Q2) for both Applied Mathematics and Computational Mathematics, with an SJR near 0.69.

The journal operates a hybrid publishing model: authors can publish under the traditional subscription route at no charge, or choose open access for an article publishing charge (see the Open Access section below). Its readership, as described by the publisher, consists of applied mathematicians, numerical analysts, computational scientists and engineers.

History

The Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics was established in 1975. The earliest material indexed for it in OpenAlex is dated March 1975 — volume 1, issue 1 — and those pioneering articles carry DOI prefixes of the form 10.1016/0771-050X(75)…, revealing that the journal originally published under the print ISSN 0771-050X. The ISSN Portal today lists 0771-050X as a cancelled ISSN for the title, with 0377-0427 as the current print ISSN (ISSN-L 0377-0427) and 1879-1778 as the online ISSN. In other words, the journal's bibliographic identity changed early in its life, but its volume numbering and publication continuity run unbroken back to 1975.

Across five decades the journal has grown into a biweekly publication releasing on the order of two dozen issues a year, with special issues and article collections forming a regular part of its output. Recent examples listed on the publisher's journal page include a call for papers on Advances in Applied and Computational Mathematics tied to the Young Applied Mathematician Conference (YAMC 2026, submission deadline 31 March 2027), a special issue on Advanced Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence & Biomedical Applications, a tribute collection Proper Value Decomposition 75 marking Paul Van Dooren's 75th birthday, a collection on subdivision, geometric and algebraic methods and isogeometric analysis, and a special issue promoting applied statistics for development in Africa. This pattern — mixing regular research articles with guest-edited thematic collections — has been characteristic of the journal for much of its history.

The journal's archive, as represented in OpenAlex, spans 1975–2026 without interruption: more than fifty years of continuous publication, encompassing roughly eighteen thousand indexed works. Few journals in computational mathematics can claim that combination of longevity and volume.

The volume numbering itself tells the story of that growth: volume 1 in 1975, volume 20 by 1987 (the year of Rousseeuw's silhouette paper), and volume 264 by 2014 (the year of the Khalil et al. fractional-derivative paper) — all per Crossref bibliographic records verified for this profile. That pace, well above one volume per year for most of the journal's life, reflects both the biweekly issue cadence and a steady program of special issues and article collections.

Aims and Scope

The following is a paraphrase of the official aims and scope published on Elsevier's journal page (retrieved 2026-10-11); it is not a quotation.

The journal seeks original papers of high scientific value across all areas of computational and applied mathematics. Its central interest lies in papers that put forward and rigorously analyze new computational techniques aimed at scientific or engineering problems. The journal is equally interested in stronger analysis of established methods and algorithms — work that clarifies how effective and how broadly applicable a technique really is.

A hard editorial requirement is evidence of computational efficiency: properties such as convergence, stability and accuracy should be demonstrated mathematically and then illustrated through substantial numerical experiments, not toy examples. Papers that describe only minor variations of existing methods, without adding genuinely new computational capabilities, fall outside the journal's interests.

The intended audience comprises applied mathematicians, numerical analysts, computational scientists and engineers — in short, researchers who both develop and use numerical methods for real problems.

Independently of the official scope, OpenAlex's topic classification of the journal's published output (attributed here as a third-party characterization, not the publisher's scope) highlights recurring themes: advanced numerical methods in computational mathematics, matrix theory and algorithms, numerical methods for differential equations, fractional differential equations, and iterative methods for nonlinear equations.

Editorial Leadership

According to the publisher's journal page (retrieved 2026-10-11), the journal is led by a team of Principal Editors:

• Zhong-Zhi Bai — Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
• Luigi Brugnano — University of Florence, Florence, Italy
• Eric Chung — Department of Mathematics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• André Keller — Statistics, Analysis and Multidisciplinary Modelling, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
• Lucia Romani — Department of Mathematics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
• Fatih Tank — Atilim University, Ankara, Türkiye

The full editorial board, including associate editors and the advisory board, is published on the journal's official page and changes over time; the list above reflects the board as displayed on the retrieval date. Readers should note that some third-party directories (including the journal's Wikipedia entry, which names a different set of editors-in-chief) can lag behind the publisher's current listing — the publisher's page is the authoritative source for who currently leads the journal. Special issues are typically overseen by guest editors drawn from the research community, as in the recent collections on artificial intelligence, subdivision methods and applied statistics noted above.

Key Facts

Country of registration is given as Belgium on the ISSN Portal record (record maintained by the ISSN Centre for the Netherlands); the publisher, Elsevier B.V., is headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal's Wikipedia record lists indexing in Scopus and in the Web of Science / Journal Citation Reports (the source of its published impact factor), along with MIAR and other bibliographic services. It carries Library of Congress Control Number 2003233964 and OCLC number 57049116, and its title is registered with the ISSN Portal (print record for ISSN 0377-0427, with the online edition linked). Authors required to publish in Web of Science- or Scopus-indexed venues for institutional or funder compliance should confirm the journal's current coverage directly with those databases, as coverage lists are updated periodically.

Landmark Papers

The papers below are among the most-cited articles ever published in the journal. Each DOI was individually verified through the Crossref API (api.crossref.org) during research for this profile in October 2026; citation counts are OpenAlex tallies retrieved 2026-10-11 and will have changed since.

1. "Silhouettes: a graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis" — Peter J. Rousseeuw (1987)

Published in volume 20, pages 53–65. DOI: 10.1016/0377-0427(87)90125-7. With more than 21,000 citations in OpenAlex, this is the single most-cited paper in the journal's history. Rousseeuw introduced the silhouette coefficient, a measure of how well each data point fits within its assigned cluster versus neighboring clusters. The silhouette plot and its summary statistic became standard tools for internal cluster validation and remain embedded in virtually every data-science software library — a remarkable afterlife for a paper published in a numerical analysis journal.

2. "A family of embedded Runge–Kutta formulae" — John R. Dormand and P. J. Prince (1980)

Published in volume 6, issue 1, pages 19–26. DOI: 10.1016/0771-050X(80)90013-3. Cited roughly 3,600 times in OpenAlex. Dormand and Prince constructed pairs of Runge–Kutta formulas of different orders sharing the same function evaluations, enabling efficient adaptive step-size control for ordinary differential equations. The Dormand–Prince pair became one of the default methods in numerical ODE software worldwide. Note the DOI's 0771-050X prefix — a fossil of the journal's original ISSN, discussed in the History section.

3. "A new definition of fractional derivative" — Roshdi Khalil, Mohammed Al Horani, A. Yousef and M. Sababheh (2014)

Published in volume 264, pages 65–70. DOI: 10.1016/j.cam.2014.01.002. Cited roughly 3,500 times in OpenAlex. The authors proposed the conformable fractional derivative, a limit-based definition intended to preserve several classical differentiation rules that older fractional derivatives lack. The paper triggered an exceptionally large follow-up literature — definitions, counterexamples, applications and extensions — making it one of the most discussed methodology papers of the 2010s in applied mathematics.

4. "On conformable fractional calculus" — Thabet Abdeljawad (2014)

Published in volume 279, pages 57–66. DOI: 10.1016/j.cam.2014.10.016. Cited roughly 2,000 times in OpenAlex. Building directly on the conformable derivative idea, Abdeljawad developed key elements of its calculus — chain rules, integration by parts, fractional integrals and connections to existing fractional operators — giving the new definition a working theoretical framework and accelerating its adoption.

5. "Finite difference approximations for fractional advection–dispersion flow equations" — Mark M. Meerschaert and Charles Tadjeran (2004)

Published in volume 172, issue 1, pages 65–77. DOI: 10.1016/j.cam.2004.01.033. Cited roughly 1,500 times in OpenAlex. The paper developed finite-difference schemes for fractional-order transport equations used to model anomalous diffusion in hydrology and contaminant transport, with stability and convergence analysis — squarely in the journal's tradition of rigorously analyzed computational techniques for applied problems.

Open Access and Article Publishing Charges

The Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics is a hybrid journal: it supports open access alongside the traditional subscription route. Under the subscription option, no publication fee is charged to authors, and articles are immediately available to subscribers. Authors who choose open access pay an article publishing charge (APC).

On the publisher's journal page (retrieved 2026-10-11), the listed open-access APC is USD 3,540 excluding taxes, with the note that the amount payable may be reduced during submission where discounts or agreements apply. Separately, OpenAlex reports a DOAJ-sourced list price of USD 3,250 (with euro, pound and yen equivalents) — price figures can differ between sources and over time, so the figure shown at submission is the one that counts, and authors should confirm taxes, waivers and eligibility with the publisher rather than treating any directory figure as a quotation.

The journal's page links to its full open-access policy, where authors can review license options and funder-compliance details. Because the journal is not a fully open-access title, authors with funder mandates should check that their chosen route (subscription with green open access, or gold open access) satisfies their funder's requirements.

Submission Information

Manuscripts are submitted through Elsevier's online submission system via the "Submit your article" link on the journal's official page, which also hosts the Guide for Authors covering formatting, reference style and article-type requirements. The journal primarily publishes original research articles, alongside guest-edited special issues announced through calls for papers with stated submission deadlines (for example, 31 March 2027 for the YAMC 2026 collection and 31 August 2026 for the AI and biomedical applications collection, as listed on the journal page).

Elsevier publishes journal-level timing statistics ("insights") on the journal page. As displayed (retrieved 2026-10-11): 12 days from submission to first decision, 106 days from submission to decision after peer review, 200 days from submission to acceptance, and 10 days from acceptance to online publication. These are journal-wide figures and individual manuscripts will vary.

Prospective authors should weigh the journal's explicit editorial bar: prove computational efficiency (convergence, stability, accuracy), illustrate it with nontrivial numerical examples, and make sure the contribution adds significant new computational properties rather than small variations on existing methods. Off-scope or purely incremental manuscripts are unlikely to survive initial screening.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics?

The print ISSN is 0377-0427 and the online ISSN is 1879-1778 (ISSN-L 0377-0427), as registered with the ISSN Portal and shown on the publisher's page. An earlier print ISSN, 0771-050X, was used in the journal's early years and is now cancelled.

Who publishes the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics?

Elsevier B.V., headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

When was the journal founded, and how often is it published?

It was established in 1975 and is published biweekly — roughly 24 issues per year.

What is the journal's impact factor?

Elsevier's journal page currently displays an Impact Factor of 2.4 and a CiteScore of 5.2; the journal's Wikipedia entry, citing Journal Citation Reports, reports 2.6 for 2024. Impact metrics are re-released annually, so consult the current Journal Citation Reports for the latest figure.

Is the journal open access, and what is the APC?

It is a hybrid journal. Subscription-route authors pay no fee; the open-access article publishing charge is listed as USD 3,540 excluding taxes on the publisher's page (retrieved 2026-10-11), subject to applicable discounts.

Who edits the journal?

As listed on the publisher's page (retrieved 2026-10-11), the Principal Editors are Zhong-Zhi Bai, Luigi Brugnano, Eric Chung, André Keller, Lucia Romani and Fatih Tank. The full, current board is on the official journal page.

Where do I submit a manuscript?

Through the "Submit your article" link on the journal's official Elsevier/ScienceDirect page, following the Guide for Authors.

What kind of papers does the journal want?

Original papers presenting and rigorously analyzing new computational techniques for scientific or engineering problems — with efficiency proved and demonstrated on nontrivial numerical examples — plus strong analyses of existing methods. Mere variants of known methods without significant new computational properties are not of interest.

Does the journal publish special issues?

Yes — guest-edited special issues and article collections are a regular feature of the journal. Recent examples listed on the publisher's page include collections on applied and computational mathematics (YAMC 2026), artificial intelligence and biomedical applications, subdivision and isogeometric methods, and applied statistics for development in Africa.

Sources

• Elsevier / ScienceDirect journal page — sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-computational-and-applied-mathematics (aims & scope, editors, APC, metrics, review times, special issues; retrieved 2026-10-11)
• ISSN Portal record for ISSN 0377-0427 — portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0377-0427 (ISSN, ISSN-L, cancelled ISSN, country; retrieved 2026-10-11)
• OpenAlex source record — api.openalex.org/sources/issn:0377-0427 (works, citations, h-index, topics, OA list prices; retrieved 2026-10-11)
• Wikipedia, "Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics" — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Computational_and_Applied_Mathematics (founding year, frequency, 2024 impact factor, CODEN, indexing; secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11)
• SCImago-derived metrics via Resurchify — resurchify.com/impact/category/Computational-Mathematics (SJR, quartile, overall rank; secondary mirror of SCImago data)
• Crossref API — api.crossref.org (individual DOI verification for all landmark papers and the 1975 volume-1 articles; October 2026)

Profile researched October 2026. Metrics, APCs, editorial boards and review times change over time; verify current figures on the publisher's official journal page before citing them.