St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics

About St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics

St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics — Journal Profile

St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics is a peer-reviewed, open access scientific journal published by Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. It is the physics and mathematics series of the university's long-running scientific journal family, whose Russian title is Nauchno-tekhnicheskie vedomosti SPbGPU. Fiziko-matematicheskie nauki. The journal's own website states that it has been published since 2008, and its current volume sequence confirms that run: volume 19, issue 3 appeared in 2026. The journal appears four times a year, charges authors nothing for publication, and makes its full content freely readable online under a Creative Commons licence.

This profile replaces a short template entry. It is built from the journal's official website at physmath.spbstu.ru (fetched in full for this profile), from the OpenAlex source record resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint, from SCImago listings based on Scopus data, and from a Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) API check carried out for this profile. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated openly rather than smoothed over.

Identity and History

The journal belongs to the scientific periodical family of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, one of Russia's major technical universities. The university issues several subject series under the shared Russian masthead Nauchno-tekhnicheskie vedomosti (Scientific and Technical Journal), and the physics and mathematics series is the family's outlet for the physical and mathematical sciences. The English-language title stored on this Journals World record — St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics — is the title under which the series is registered in international indexing sources, and the journal's own English pages use the closely related styling St. Petersburg Polytechnic University Journal: Physics and Mathematics.

The journal states on its official site that it has been published since 2008. From 2015 to 2017 the journal was published in partnership with Elsevier, and the issues of those years remain available on ScienceDirect; that publishing episode explains why the OpenAlex source record for the journal names Elsevier BV as host organisation and why OpenAlex's article coverage concentrates on the 2015–2021 window. Since that arrangement ended, the journal has been produced by the university itself, and its archive is held in the university's electronic library and the National Digital Library, as the journal site explains. In 2026 the journal reached volume 19, with issue 3 current at the time this profile was prepared — a volume count that counts forward consistently from the stated 2008 start.

A bibliographic caution belongs in any profile of this journal, because the university's series share near-identical titles and near-identical ISSNs. The economics series of the same family carries print ISSN 2304-9774 and online ISSN 2618-8678; the physics and mathematics series carries 2304-9782 and 2618-8686. The digits differ by only a few places, and the economics profile on this site (post 376021) warns about exactly this confusion in its own text. Authors and librarians should always copy the ISSN from the masthead of the individual issue being cited, and should give the full series title, including the words Physics and Mathematics, in every reference.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's own statement of scope describes an open access journal covering a wide array of subjects in the physical and mathematical sciences, including, but not limited to, condensed matter physics, atomic physics, optics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, theoretical physics, biophysics, mechanics and mathematical analysis. Because the scope is deliberately broad, the editors ask authors to write their papers in a language understandable to specialists in neighbouring areas of expertise, not only to readers inside a narrow subfield — a house rule that authors should take seriously when preparing the introduction and conclusions of a submission.

The OpenAlex source record, resolved through its ISSN endpoint for this profile, paints a consistent topical picture. Its leading topics for the journal include elasticity and wave propagation, solid-state spectroscopy and crystallography, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics studies, crystallography and radiation phenomena, ferroelectric and piezoelectric materials, and turbulent flow. That spread — solid-state and optical physics on one side, continuum mechanics and mathematical analysis on the other — is the practical footprint of the scope statement above, and it is a useful guide to fit: a manuscript in photonics, plasma-adjacent theoretical physics, applied mechanics or mathematical modelling sits naturally here, while a paper in pure chemistry, life sciences or engineering design without a physics or mathematics core does not.

The journal accepts previously unpublished original research papers and review articles that are not under consideration elsewhere, and it requires submitted work to be scientifically and technically accurate. Only original work should be sent: the journal's stated position is that it accepts papers that have not been published before and are not being considered for publication in another venue at the same time.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

The founder and publisher is Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, as the journal site states in plain terms, and publishing is carried out through the university in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. The older Journals World template entry rendered the publisher only as a numeric code (5682); the verified publisher is the university itself, and that correction is recorded in the sources file accompanying this profile.

The journal's editor-in-chief page profiles Professor Ivanov, a theoretical physicist at the university's Institute of Physics, Nanotechnology and Telecommunications (named on the page in its English rendering), who received his Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences degree in 1974 from the Ioffe Institute with a thesis on intershell correlations in the photoionization of atoms, and his Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences degree in 1988 with a thesis on the quantum theory of atomic processes. He has worked at the university since 1978, leading a research group on the theory of many-electron atoms and atomic processes. His research interests — many-electron effects in atomic ionization, the structure of atomic systems, photoabsorption by positive and negative ions, resonant phenomena in nanostructures and channeling in crystalline solids — reflect the journal's strength in atomic and condensed matter theory. A full editorial board is listed on the journal site, and authors should consult the current board page before submitting, since board membership changes over time.

The journal's postal address, given on its own contact materials, is 29 Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian Federation.

Peer Review, Ethics and Licensing

Upon submission, all papers are subject to single-blind peer review, in which reviewers know the authors' identities. The journal states that it is committed to publication ethics and follows the ethical guidelines set out by its editorial board, in line with the standards adopted by the scientific community and in particular with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Editors, reviewers and authors are all expected to follow those guidelines.

Journal content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). A licence agreement is concluded with authors for the transfer of rights in the paper to the publisher, as the journal site describes it, so authors should read that agreement carefully before signing: the arrangement differs from journals where authors retain full copyright and grant only a licence to publish. Full texts and metadata are transferred to the National Digital Library and to the Digital Library of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, which supports long-term accessibility of the archive.

Metrics and What They Mean

Several distinct metric pictures exist for this journal, and they measure different corpora, so they should not be mixed. The SCImago listing for the journal (based on Scopus data, fetched for this profile) shows an SJR of 0.166 with a Q4 quartile position and 63 documents published in 2025, with Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University named as publisher. The journal's own site announces that it has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus, thanking its authors, reviewers and editors — an announcement consistent with the SCImago listing's recent document counts.

OpenAlex tells a narrower story because its coverage of this title is incomplete. Resolving the source through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint returned source S2765076009, with 207 works, 865 citations, an h-index of 14 and an i10-index of 27, and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0 at checking time. OpenAlex gives the source's first publication year as 2015 and its last as 2021, which matches the Elsevier-era window rather than the journal's full run since 2008. Authors should therefore treat the OpenAlex figures as a partial snapshot of the journal's internationally indexed output, not as a measure of the whole journal. The older Journals World record carried an h-index of 7, which matches the SCImago h-index shown in its 2021 ranking table — again a database snapshot from a particular corpus and year, not a contradiction of the OpenAlex figure.

The practical reading of these numbers is modest but real: this is a university journal with a genuine, Scopus-visible research output concentrated in physics and applied mathematics, cited mainly within its specialist communities. It is not a high-impact-factor venue, and no impact factor from Clarivate was verified for it in the sources fetched for this profile; the journal is, however, listed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (see Indexing below), which is the Web of Science tier for journals still building toward the flagship citation indexes.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal site lists the following indexing and abstracting services: Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index), Scopus, the Russian Science Citation Index, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, ScienceDirect for the 2015–2017 issues, DOAJ, Google Scholar, EBSCO, Math-Net.Ru, ProQuest, ROAD, CNKI and CyberLeninka. That is a broad discoverability footprint for a university journal, spanning the two major Western citation ecosystems, the Russian national citation index and mathematics portal, and the large Chinese and open web scholarly indexes.

One item on that list needs an honest flag. A DOAJ search-API check by each of the journal's three ISSNs (2304-9782, 2618-8686 and 2405-7223), carried out in the foreground for this profile, returned no DOAJ record for the journal at checking time, even though the journal site names DOAJ among its indexers. The discrepancy may reflect a lapsed or pending directory entry; it is recorded here as a verify-first item, and readers who need DOAJ confirmation for a funder mandate should check the directory directly rather than rely on either the journal's list or this profile.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through the journal's official website at physmath.spbstu.ru, where a Guide for Authors collects the rules on submission contents and structure, formatting guidelines, the submission process, the journal's position on the use of artificial intelligence tools, its peer review arrangements, and its requirements for abstracts and references. The journal is published four times a year and publication is free of charge: all expenses are covered by the journal, so there is no article processing charge, no submission fee and no page charge to budget for. Authors must sign a licence agreement with the publisher. Papers should be written accessibly for specialists across the physical and mathematical sciences, following the journal's own advice on framing, and must be original, unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.

The Journal Family and the University Behind It

Understanding this journal is easier once its family is understood. Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University publishes a stable of subject series under one Russian masthead, each series serving one broad territory of the university's research: economics, physics and mathematics, humanities, engineering and others. The series share a publisher, a city, a visual identity and confusingly similar ISSN blocks, but they are editorially separate journals with separate boards, separate archives and separate indexing records. The physics and mathematics series is the family's home for the exact sciences, and its archive sits inside the university's electronic library alongside the archives of its sibling series. Its articles carry DOIs, and its full texts and metadata are also transferred to Russia's National Digital Library, which gives the backfile a second, national point of access beyond the journal's own site.

The university itself is one of the Russian Federation's oldest and largest technical universities, and the journal reflects that institutional base: much of its content originates in the university's own physics institutes and in the wider St. Petersburg research community, including the Ioffe Institute tradition from which its editor-in-chief's own career began. At the same time the journal addresses, in its own words, the international scientific community, maintains an English-language site and English article records, and asks authors to write for readers across the physical and mathematical sciences rather than for a single laboratory's specialists. For an author outside Russia, that combination — a university-published, fee-free, Scopus-listed venue with an English-facing platform — is the journal's distinctive offer.

Who Reads It and Who Should Publish Here

The natural readership is researchers in theoretical and condensed matter physics, optics, astrophysics, mechanics and applied mathematics, in Russia and internationally, who follow the St. Petersburg schools in those subjects. The journal suits authors whose work is solid specialist research that benefits from a broad physics-and-mathematics readership, who need Scopus or Web of Science (ESCI) visibility, and who cannot or do not wish to pay article processing charges. It is a less natural home for work whose value depends on very rapid turnaround at a large commercial title, or for manuscripts aimed at a purely engineering audience, since the editors explicitly frame the journal around the physical and mathematical sciences and ask for writing that neighbouring specialists can follow.

Similar and Sibling Journals

Within the same university family, the economics series (ISSN 2304-9774 / 2618-8678) and the other SPbPU series serve different disciplines and should never be confused with this title. Among Russian university physics and mathematics journals appearing alongside this title in SCImago's Russian Federation listings are the Journal of Siberian Federal University — Mathematics and Physics, Izvestiya of Saratov University. Physics, Fundamental and Applied Hydrophysics, and the Russian Journal of Nonlinear Dynamics. Internationally, authors in condensed matter, optics and mathematical physics will also weigh general physics journals from commercial publishers, but those titles typically levy article charges for open access publication, whereas this journal publishes free of charge — a material difference for authors without grant support for fees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics?

The print ISSN is 2304-9782 and the online ISSN is 2618-8686. The journal site also displays a third ISSN, 2405-7223, which appears in the OpenAlex source record as well; the Journals World record stores the 2304-9782 / 2618-8686 pair.

Who publishes the journal?

Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, is both founder and publisher. From 2015 to 2017 the journal was published in partnership with Elsevier, and those issues remain on ScienceDirect.

Is the journal open access?

Yes. The journal describes itself as an open access journal, and its content is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. Publication is free of charge for authors; the journal covers all expenses.

Is the journal peer-reviewed?

Yes. All submitted papers undergo single-blind peer review, and the journal states that it follows the ethical guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Where is the journal indexed?

The journal site lists the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, Scopus, the Russian Science Citation Index, Google Scholar, EBSCO, Math-Net.Ru, ProQuest, CNKI and others. Its claimed DOAJ listing could not be verified through the DOAJ search API at the time this profile was prepared, as explained in the Indexing section above.

What subjects does the journal cover?

Condensed matter physics, atomic physics, optics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, theoretical physics, biophysics, mechanics and mathematical analysis, among related topics in the physical and mathematical sciences.

How often does the journal appear, and since when?

It is published four times a year and has appeared since 2008; volume 19 was current in 2026.

What metrics does the journal have?

SCImago (Scopus-based) shows SJR 0.166, Q4, with 63 documents in 2025. OpenAlex (source S2765076009, whose coverage concentrates on 2015–2021) records 207 works, 865 citations and an h-index of 14. Figures are snapshots from different corpora and are attributed to their sources in the Metrics section above.