Mathematical Problems in Engineering

About Mathematical Problems in Engineering

Mathematical Problems in Engineering — Journal Profile

Mathematical Problems in Engineering was a broad, open access journal of engineering mathematics published by Hindawi, latterly under John Wiley & Sons after Wiley acquired Hindawi, which published rigorous engineering research carried out with mathematical tools. The publisher's journal page, still live as an archive, states the fact every reader of this profile must know first: the journal ceased publishing as of September 2024, and all content published in it remains available to access on the publisher platform. This is therefore a profile of a closed journal with a large surviving archive, not of a venue currently inviting submissions. Any website or agent claiming in 2026 to accept new manuscripts for Mathematical Problems in Engineering, or to charge a fee for placing a paper in it, should be treated with extreme caution and checked directly against the publisher's page, because the publisher itself says publication has ceased.

The JournalsWorld record for this post, slug mathematical-problems-in-engineering, records coverage in 1992 and from 1995 to 2024, an h-index of 105 and a Q3 grouping, and three identifiers: 1024-123X, 1026-7077 and 1563-5147. The publisher's page confirms two of them directly, giving print ISSN 1024-123X and online ISSN 1563-5147. The third number on the stored record, 1026-7077, could not be verified on the publisher pages fetched for this profile, and it is flagged in the corrections note at the end of this profile as a stored value needing checking against the ISSN Portal record for the title. A careful profile reports that discrepancy openly rather than silently copying all three numbers as if each had been confirmed at source, and rather than silently deleting a stored identifier that may yet prove to be a legitimate historical identifier for an earlier format of the title.

Quick Facts

Identity and History

The journal's origins lie in the mid-1990s expansion of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, the company founded in Cairo in 1997 by Ahmed Hindawi and Nagwa Abdelmottaleb, building on earlier Hindawi publishing activity in Egypt. The stored coverage record, which shows a single year in 1992 and then a continuous run from 1995, reflects a title that began in the early 1990s and settled into regular publication as Hindawi grew into one of the largest open access publishers of its era. For most of its life the journal's promise, in its own long-used scope wording summarised by indexing services, was rapid publication and dissemination of important mathematical work with relevance to engineering, across all areas of engineering, with aerospace, bioengineering, chemical, computer, electrical, industrial and manufacturing, and mechanical engineering named as areas of particular interest, and mathematical work on ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic processes, calculus of variations and nonlinear analysis named as core methods.

Three later chapters define the journal's present reputation and must be stated plainly in any honest profile. First, in January 2021 John Wiley & Sons acquired Hindawi for an enterprise value reported at 298 million US dollars, and the journal became part of the Wiley portfolio while retaining the Hindawi name and platform for a time. Second, in March 2023 the journal was among nineteen Hindawi journals removed from Web of Science coverage amid concerns about editorial practices and paper-mill activity affecting parts of the Hindawi programme; Hindawi confirmed the list of delisted titles, which included this journal, to Retraction Watch. Large numbers of articles across Hindawi journals were retracted in 2022 and 2023 after investigations into compromised peer review, and by the end of 2023 Wiley announced it would retire the Hindawi brand. Third, Wiley subsequently closed a further group of former Hindawi journals, and Mathematical Problems in Engineering was among the titles that ended: the publisher page states it ceased publishing as of September 2024, with its archive remaining available. None of this history erases the genuine engineering mathematics the journal published over three decades, much of it by authors with no connection to any misconduct. It does mean that readers must appraise individual articles in its archive on their own merits, check for retraction or concern notices attached to the specific article they are using, and never treat the journal's former indexing status as a current endorsement.

That last discipline — checking the individual article, not the journal label — is the single most useful piece of guidance this profile can give. Bibliographic databases record notices at article level. The publisher platform marks retracted content. A 2008 paper on disturbance invariant sets for discrete-time linear systems, a heavily cited survey of particle swarm optimisation, and a review of methods for fixing the number of hidden neurons in neural networks — all identified in topic summaries as among the journal's most cited papers — stand or fall by their own contents and subsequent literature, exactly as a paper caught up in the later paper-mill period stands or falls by the notices attached to it. Lumping the entire archive into either blanket trust or blanket condemnation is poor scholarship in both directions.

Scope and Subject Coverage

In its active life the journal was deliberately broad. Its stated aim was to publish results of rigorous engineering research carried out using mathematical tools, and to welcome contributions whose formulations or results related to applications. OpenAlex topic data for the source, resolved through the ISSN endpoint, shows what that breadth produced in practice: its leading topics at checking time were stability and control of uncertain systems, metaheuristic optimisation algorithms, multi-criteria decision making, adaptive control of nonlinear systems, and neural network stability and synchronisation. Topic summaries based on its published contents likewise found control theory as the largest single theme, followed by mathematical optimisation, algorithms, artificial intelligence and nonlinear systems, with connections into computer vision, pattern recognition and mathematical analysis. A researcher surveying the archive should therefore expect the centre of gravity to sit in control, optimisation and computational methods for engineering systems, rather than in, for example, structural civil engineering design or thermal sciences, even though those areas were formally within scope.

The journal published original research articles and review articles, and during the Hindawi era it made heavy use of special issues organised around themes, a model shared across the publisher's programme. Special issues contributed to the journal's very large article volumes in its final decade — OpenAlex counts more than twenty-one thousand works for the source in total — and they are also the part of the archive where later quality concerns were concentrated across the publisher's programme generally. Readers using a special-issue paper from the final years should apply the article-level checks described above with particular care, including searching the exact article title for any later notice, and corroborating any result they intend to build on with an independent source where the stakes justify it.

Editorial Model and Peer Review — Historical

Hindawi journals of this era typically operated with an editorial board model rather than a single powerful editor-in-chief, with academic editors handling manuscripts in their areas, supported by the publisher's editorial staff. Reference summaries of the publisher note that most Hindawi journals had editorial boards of volunteer scholars, in some titles numbering from dozens to hundreds, rather than a named individual editor for the whole journal. Consistent with that model, this profile names no editor-in-chief for Mathematical Problems in Engineering, because no individual holder was verified from a fetched publisher page during this check, and the journal is in any case closed, so no current editorial leadership exists to name. Historical board membership can be recovered from the archived journal pages and from the mastheads of individual published articles, which is the correct route for anyone researching the journal's governance for scholarly purposes.

Peer review during the active period was presented by the publisher as conventional scholarly review by subject editors and referees, and the journal charged an article processing charge as an open access Hindawi title. OpenAlex's source record lists an APC figure of USD 2,550 for the title at checking time. That figure is now purely historical: the journal accepts no new submissions, so no author should be paying any charge to publish in it today, and this profile states the figure only so that readers evaluating older information, or approached by a third party quoting a fee, can recognise a number that once belonged to a live journal and no longer authorises any payment. Authors seeking a current home for engineering-mathematics work should instead look at live titles in the similar journals section and verify each candidate's status on its publisher's own page before submitting anything.

Metrics — Reported With Attribution

The JournalsWorld stored record gives the journal an h-index of 105 and a Q3 grouping. A SCImago-based summary returned in search results gave the same h-index family, listing an impact factor figure of 1.940 for 2025 in that summary's own reporting, an SJR of 0.303, and subject placement in engineering and mathematics, with the publisher named as Hindawi Publishing Corporation and the country as Egypt. A second summary platform listed an older SCImago h-index of 95 and SJR of 0.4, from an earlier year, which illustrates how quickly the values attached to this title shifted in its final years. Because the journal ceased publishing in September 2024, all such figures are now frozen historical values from their respective reporting years, not live indicators, and any source presenting a current-year impact factor for this title should be read as republishing stale or modelled data rather than a new official measurement.

OpenAlex, through source S178238111 resolved from ISSN 1024-123X at checking time, records 21,412 works, 242,205 citations, an h-index of 118, an i10-index of 7,102 and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.05, with sharply falling yearly work counts in its recent data — small double-digit work counts for 2025 and 2026 against the journal's former high-volume years — consistent with a title that stopped publishing in 2024 and whose residual records are corrections, notices and late-indexed items. The substantive reading of these numbers is that the archive is large and genuinely cited, especially in control and optimisation, and that its citation life continues after closure because engineers and mathematicians still use the methods literature it accumulated. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be verified from the DOAJ search API output obtained for this profile, so no current DOAJ claim is made here; the journal was an open access title in its active life, but present-tense listing claims for a closed journal would mislead.

Indexing and the Archive Today

Historically the journal was covered by Scopus and by the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded until its removal from Web of Science in March 2023, and its contents remain discoverable through the publisher platform, OpenAlex, Scopus-derived summaries and general scholarly search. Its archive is preserved on the publisher platform, whose page states that all content published in the journal will remain available to access there. For citation purposes, authors should cite papers from this archive exactly as they would any closed journal's papers: author, title, journal name, year, volume and article number or pages, and DOI where one exists, which Hindawi-era articles carry in the 10.1155 prefix family. What authors should not do is describe the journal in a new manuscript's covering material as currently indexed in Web of Science, because that ceased to be true in 2023, a year before the journal itself closed.

Guidance for Readers and Authors

For readers, the archive remains worth using, with checks. Search it for control, optimisation and computational methods literature, particularly from its first two decades; verify that the specific article carries no retraction or expression of concern; and, for work from the special-issue-heavy final period, corroborate important claims independently. For authors, the guidance is shorter: do not submit here, because the journal is closed, and do not pay any person or service that offers to place a paper in it. Redirect the manuscript to a live journal whose publisher page confirms it is accepting submissions, whose ISSN and indexing you have checked in the same way this profile checks its subject, and whose editorial model you understand. Several neighbouring live titles are named below as starting points for that search, not as recommendations, because the right home depends on the paper's exact subject and the author's needs on charges, speed and audience.

For librarians and catalogue maintainers, this record is a good example of why status fields matter as much as title fields. A record that continues to present a closed, formerly delisted journal as an ordinary active Q3 title invites exactly the misdirected submissions and fee payments described above. The stored record's coverage ending in 2024 is accurate as far as it goes; the profile text is where the closure and the 2023 Web of Science removal belong in plain words, and that is where this profile has put them, attributed to the publisher's own page and to the publisher's confirmation reported at the time.

Similar Journals

Authors and readers working in the same territory should look at live engineering-mathematics and applied-mathematics titles and verify each one's current status before relying on it. The Journal of Applied Mathematics and the Journal of Engineering, both named on Hindawi-era journal pages as neighbouring titles in the same programme and both subject to the same need for a current-status check, cover adjacent ground. The International Journal of Engineering Mathematics was itself recorded as having ceased publication on its publisher page returned in this check, which underlines the verification point. Beyond the former Hindawi programme, established applied mathematics, optimisation and control journals from other publishers serve the control-theory and optimisation communities that formed this journal's core readership. Mathematical Modelling of Engineering Problems is a different and separate title despite the similar name, published by a different organisation with different ISSNs, and should never be confused with this journal in a catalogue or reference list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mathematical Problems in Engineering still accepting submissions? No. The publisher's journal page states that it ceased publishing as of September 2024, with its archive remaining available. Do not pay any fee offered by a third party for placement in this journal.

What are its ISSNs? The publisher page confirms print ISSN 1024-123X and online ISSN 1563-5147. The JournalsWorld record also carries 1026-7077, which could not be verified on fetched publisher pages and is flagged for checking.

Why was it removed from Web of Science? It was one of nineteen Hindawi journals removed in March 2023, a list Hindawi confirmed at the time, amid concerns about editorial practices and paper-mill activity affecting parts of the Hindawi programme.

Are papers in its archive still usable? Yes, with article-level care. Check the specific article for retraction or concern notices, and corroborate important claims from the journal's final, special-issue-heavy years independently where the stakes justify it.

What are its metrics? The stored record gives h-index 105 and Q3; OpenAlex gives h-index 118 from 21,412 works and 242,205 citations at checking time. All are historical values for a closed journal, reported with attribution in the metrics section.

Who published it? Hindawi, founded in Cairo, Egypt, latterly under John Wiley & Sons, which acquired Hindawi in January 2021 and retired the Hindawi brand after 2023.

What did it publish? Rigorous engineering research using mathematical tools, centred in practice on control theory, optimisation, algorithms, nonlinear systems and computational methods, across all branches of engineering.

Sources, Verification and Corrections Note

This profile is based on the publisher's journal page for Mathematical Problems in Engineering (giving print and online ISSNs and the September 2024 cessation statement, under a John Wiley & Sons copyright line), Retraction Watch's March 2023 reporting of the nineteen delisted Hindawi titles as confirmed by Hindawi, reference summaries of Hindawi's founding in Cairo in 1997 and its January 2021 acquisition by Wiley, SCImago-based summaries giving the journal's subject areas and metric history, and OpenAlex source S178238111 resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 1024-123X at checking time, together with the JournalsWorld stored record and twin check for post 2616. The twin check's searches on all three stored ISSNs returned only this post, and no other candidate shared its identifiers in its own top matter. Corrections item: the stored record's third ISSN, 1026-7077, could not be verified on the publisher pages fetched and should be checked against the ISSN Portal before being relied on; the stored publisher field in the thin template record was a numeric code rather than a publisher name, while the verified publisher is Hindawi, latterly Wiley. Fields that could not be verified are stated as could not be verified or not publicly disclosed in the sources checked, rather than being filled from assumption.