Methods and Applications of Analysis

About Methods and Applications of Analysis

About Methods and Applications of Analysis

Methods and Applications of Analysis (often shortened to MAA) is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published by International Press of Boston in the United States. It has appeared since 1994 and occupies a specific, well-defined niche: it publishes new work in mathematical analysis only where that work carries a direct or potential application to the biological and physical sciences or to engineering. That founding editorial line, set out when the first issue appeared in January 1994, still describes the journal accurately today. A paper that develops a genuinely new analytical technique with a credible route into physics, biology or engineering belongs here; a paper that simply applies a known method to a routine applied problem, or that generalises a classical result purely for the sake of abstraction, does not. Understanding that distinction is the single most useful thing an author can know about this journal before submitting.

The journal's identifiers are print ISSN 1073-2772 and electronic ISSN 1945-0001. Its articles are distributed through Project Euclid, where the journal sits in the Euclid Prime collection and full text is held from volume 10, issue 3 (2004) onward. The journal is partially sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Mathematics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and by the Zheng Ge Ru Foundation, a sponsorship that reflects the strong Hong Kong connection present from its founding: one of its two founding editors-in-chief, Roderick S. C. Wong, was based at the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, while the other, Robert M. Miura, was at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

History and Editorial Identity

The journal was launched at the start of 1994 with a deliberately narrow brief. Its founding announcement described a journal for "high quality mathematical papers treating that part of analysis which has direct or potential applications to the biological and physical sciences and engineering." The founding editorial board was notably senior: it included Richard A. Askey of the University of Wisconsin, Mourad E. H. Ismail, Christopher K. R. T. Jones, J. Bryce McLeod, Frank W. J. Olver and Nico M. Temme, among others — a line-up heavy in special functions, asymptotics and applied analysis, which signalled the journal's centre of gravity from the outset. Askey's long service was marked by the journal itself in 1999, when volume 6, issue 1 was dedicated to him on his sixty-fifth birthday, noting that he had served on the editorial board since the journal started publishing in 1994.

International Press of Boston, the publisher, is a specialist mathematics and physics publisher based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Methods and Applications of Analysis sits within its list of research journals in pure and applied mathematics. The journal's later move onto Project Euclid, the Cornell-based platform for mathematics and statistics literature, placed it alongside society and university-press titles of similar character and gave its back file a stable digital home. The combination of a Boston publisher, a Hong Kong sponsorship link and an international board explains why the journal's authorship has always been geographically broad despite its modest size.

Scope in Detail

The topics named in the journal's founding scope remain the best guide to what it publishes: approximation theory, asymptotic analysis, the calculus of variations, integral equations, integral transforms, ordinary and partial differential equations, perturbation methods and special functions. Its later published aims and scope, as carried on Project Euclid, widen that list in the directions the field itself moved: mathematical physics, the mathematical theory of continuum mechanics, dynamical systems, stochastic analysis, numerical analysis, and the algebraic analysis of differential and integral equations. Papers that open new directions in analysis are explicitly welcomed.

Three boundary rules follow from the stated scope and are worth repeating because they decide real submissions. First, the analytical content must be the contribution: the journal wants new techniques and new results in applied analysis, not competent applications of existing techniques to new datasets or standard models. Second, pure generalisation for its own sake is out of scope — a classical theorem extended to a more abstract setting, with no application in view, will be redirected by editors even if it is correct and difficult. Third, papers primarily in the computing sciences are not considered; numerical analysis is welcome when the analysis is the point, but a computational paper whose contribution is software or simulation practice belongs elsewhere. Authors whose work sits near any of these boundaries should address the fit question directly in their covering material rather than leave it to the editor to infer.

What the Journal Publishes

In practice, the journal's pages are dominated by research articles on differential equations and their qualitative theory, asymptotic and perturbation methods for problems arising in physics and continuum mechanics, special functions and orthogonal polynomials, integral transforms and equations, and stochastic and dynamical systems treated analytically. The dedication issue for Askey in 1999 is a fair sample of the journal's identity: deep, technique-driven analysis connected to special functions, written by and for specialists. Special and themed issues honouring senior figures in the field have been a recurring feature, and they tend to attract concentrated clusters of papers in asymptotics and special functions.

Because the journal is small — OpenAlex records 786 works for the source in total — each issue carries a limited number of papers, and the journal does not attempt the breadth of the large generalist analysis titles. Its value to authors is the opposite of breadth: a readership of analysts who work at the interface with applications, and referees drawn from exactly that community.

Metrics and Indexing — Reading the Numbers Carefully

Figures for this journal differ sharply between databases, and one figure in circulation deserves a direct correction. The Journals World record previously carried an h-index of 6 for this title; that figure is not credible for a journal publishing since 1994 and should not be used. OpenAlex, resolving the source directly by its ISSNs (source S2764760990), records 786 works and 10,771 citations, with an h-index of 49, an i10-index of 287 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.13. Those OpenAlex figures are the ones cited in this profile, and they paint the realistic picture: a long-lived specialist journal whose papers accumulate citations slowly but steadily, with a substantial minority of papers cited ten times or more.

The low two-year citedness alongside a healthy lifetime h-index is typical of mathematics, where papers are cited over decades rather than in the two-year window used by journal impact factors, and where citation density is far lower than in the life sciences. Authors should therefore not judge this journal by short-window metrics designed for biomedical fields. Its standing is better judged by its longevity, its board, its publisher and its presence on Project Euclid.

On indexing: the journal is a subscription title distributed through Project Euclid's Euclid Prime collection. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by both ISSNs returned no record in the check carried out for this profile, which is expected for a subscription journal and is not a quality signal in either direction. A Clarivate Journal Impact Factor for the title could not be verified from public sources used here, and no impact factor is claimed in this profile. Authors whose institutions require a specific index listing should confirm the journal's current status in that index directly before submitting, since listings change and secondary websites frequently carry stale or invented metric values for this title.

Editorial Process and Publishing with the Journal

All papers are in English, a condition stated at the journal's founding and unchanged since. Submissions follow International Press's journal submission route, and manuscripts are refereed by specialists in the relevant branch of analysis. Authors should expect refereeing standards typical of established mathematics journals: correctness and genuine novelty are both required, and the applied-analysis fit test described above is applied by editors as a first screen. Because the journal is quarterly and small, acceptance places a paper in a short queue of strongly on-scope work rather than in a high-volume pipeline.

Practical preparation advice for this journal is mostly about positioning. State the new analytical technique or result in the abstract in one plain sentence, and name the class of applications it serves. If the application is potential rather than demonstrated, say so honestly and explain the route — the founding scope explicitly allows potential applications, but it does not allow vague ones. Keep the introduction's literature discussion centred on analysis rather than on the application domain, since the referees will be analysts. And check the journal's recent issues on Project Euclid before submitting: the fastest way to calibrate the expected level of analytical depth is to read the three or four most recent papers closest to your topic.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

The ideal submission is a paper by a mathematical analyst whose new result — an asymptotic expansion, a well-posedness or stability theorem, a transform method, a special-function identity with analytical consequences — speaks to problems in physics, biology or engineering, but whose contribution is the mathematics. Researchers in mathematical physics, continuum mechanics, applied dynamical systems and stochastic analysis will find the journal's scope language written for them. The journal is also a natural home for work in special functions and orthogonal polynomials, reflecting its founding board.

It is the wrong home for: computational papers whose contribution is an algorithm implementation or simulation study; applied modelling papers that use standard analytical tools without developing them; and pure-analysis papers with no application in view, however strong. Each of those categories has better-placed journals, and the editors' stated scope rules mean such papers are unlikely to survive screening here. Authors should also weigh the journal's citation tempo honestly: if a career deadline requires rapid, high-volume citation accumulation, a small specialist mathematics title is a difficult choice; if the goal is to place a durable analytical result in front of the community that will use it for decades, the journal's profile fits well.

Reading the Journal's Back File

Because full text on Project Euclid reaches back to volume 10 (2004) and the journal began in 1994, a reader tracing a technique can follow roughly three decades of development in one place. That continuity matters in this field: an asymptotic method published in the late 1990s may be cited, refined and re-applied in papers twenty years later, and the journal's h-index profile — many papers with moderate, long-lived citation counts rather than a few blockbusters — is exactly the fingerprint of that pattern. OpenAlex counts 287 of its works cited at least ten times, which for a journal of under 800 works is a substantial durable core. Graduate students entering applied analysis will find the back file useful for a second reason: the journal's scope discipline means that almost every paper models how to present an analytical result together with the application that motivates it, a presentational skill that generalist journals teach less consistently.

The special-issue tradition also shapes the back file. Issues dedicated to senior figures, such as the 1999 Askey issue in volume 6, gather invited and contributed work around one person's research area, and they remain convenient entry points into special functions and orthogonal polynomials. A reader who works through such an issue gets both the state of the area at that date and a map of its main research groups, since the contributors to dedication issues are typically the dedicatee's collaborators, students and peers.

How This Journal Differs from Its Neighbours

Prospective authors often confuse this title with several similarly named journals, and the distinctions matter because each has different editors, publishers and expectations. It is not the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, the large Elsevier title founded in 1960; it is not Analysis and Applications, the World Scientific journal founded in 2003; and it is not the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis. Methods and Applications of Analysis is the smaller International Press title, with the founding scope rule — new analytical methods with applications in view — that the larger generalist titles do not apply in the same form. Checking the ISSNs (1073-2772 and 1945-0001) is the reliable way to confirm that a citation, a ranking entry or a call for papers refers to this journal and not to a namesake, because aggregator websites routinely merge or mislabel similarly titled mathematics journals, and at least one figure previously attached to this journal's name in secondary listings (an h-index of 6) appears to have come from exactly that kind of confusion.

That caution generalises. For mathematics journals especially, metric listings on commercial aggregator sites should be treated as leads to verify, not as facts: verify against the publisher's own pages, against the ISSN record, and against a bibliometric database that resolves the source by ISSN, as was done with OpenAlex for this profile. Where two databases disagree, prefer the one whose record you can inspect at source level, and report the database alongside the number, as this profile does.

Costs, Access and Rights — What Could Be Verified

The journal operates on the subscription model through Project Euclid's Euclid Prime collection, so most readers will reach full text through a university library subscription, and individual article access follows the platform's standard terms. No article processing charge for authors is advertised in the sources consulted for this profile, and the journal is not an open-access title; authors with funder mandates requiring immediate open access should discuss compliance routes with the publisher before submitting, since no open-access option could be verified from public sources used here, and this profile does not claim one. Copyright and reuse terms follow International Press's standard journal terms as presented on its site at the time of acceptance. Where a detail of this kind is missing from a profile, the correct reading is that it was not publicly disclosed in the sources checked — not that the answer is negative — and the publisher's current instructions to authors are the authoritative place to confirm it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Methods and Applications of Analysis?
Print ISSN 1073-2772 and electronic ISSN 1945-0001.

Who publishes the journal?
International Press of Boston, a specialist mathematics publisher based in Somerville, Massachusetts, United States. An earlier version of this page showed the publisher as a bare number; that was a data error, corrected in this profile.

When did the journal start?
Its first issue appeared in January 1994, with Robert M. Miura and Roderick S. C. Wong as founding editors-in-chief.

What does the journal publish?
New techniques and results in applied analysis — including asymptotics, differential and integral equations, special functions, perturbation methods, dynamical systems, stochastic and numerical analysis — where the work has direct or potential applications to the natural sciences or engineering.

What is the journal's h-index?
OpenAlex records an h-index of 49 for the source (786 works, 10,771 citations) in the data consulted for this profile. Figures differ between databases; the value of 6 previously shown on this page was incorrect.

Is the journal open access?
It is a subscription journal; full text is available through Project Euclid's Euclid Prime collection, and it was not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals in the check made for this profile.

Does the journal accept computational papers?
Papers primarily in the computing sciences are outside its stated scope. Numerical analysis is welcome when the analytical contribution is central.

Sources consulted for this profile: International Press journal materials and the journal's 1999 dedication issue (intlpress.com); the journal's aims and scope as carried by Project Euclid; the journal's 1994 launch announcement; OpenAlex source record S2764760990 resolved by ISSN; Directory of Open Access Journals API search by ISSN; secondary journal directories for frequency and publisher address details. Metrics are attributed to their databases as stated and were checked in October 2026.