Teaching of Mathematics

About Teaching of Mathematics

The Teaching of Mathematics — Journal Profile

The Teaching of Mathematics is a Serbian research journal devoted to a single question: how mathematics should be taught and learned, at every level from the first school years to the university. It has been published since 1998 by the Mathematical Society of Serbia — Društvo matematičara Srbije — in Belgrade, and it began life as a separate volume of Nastava Matematike, the Serbian pedagogical journal edited since 1952. Its print ISSN is 1451-4966 and its online ISSN is 2406-1077. The journal is exclusively research oriented: it publishes papers containing essentially new ideas and techniques relevant for the teaching of mathematics at all levels, with a particular welcome for subject analysis of teaching themes and new ways of modelling them. It is fully open access, charges authors nothing at any stage, and is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. This profile brings together what its own site, its DOAJ record and independent bibliometric sources verify about its identity, history, editorial arrangements, metrics and route to submission.

At a Glance

Full title: The Teaching of Mathematics
Print ISSN: 1451-4966
Online ISSN: 2406-1077
Publisher: Društvo matematičara Srbije (Mathematical Society of Serbia), Kneza Mihaila 35/IV, P.O. Box 355, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
Founded: 1998, as a separate volume of Nastava Matematike (published since 1952)
Founder and first Editor-in-Chief: Milosav M. Marjanović (1998–2023)
Editors: Rade Živaljević (Mathematical Institute SASA, Belgrade) and Zoran Kadelburg (University of Belgrade)
Review model: Anonymous refereeing — each manuscript is reviewed by at least two anonymous referees, per the journal's author instructions
Fees: No article processing charge, no submission charge, no publication fee (journal's own statement)
Access: Fully open access; also carried by the Electronic Library of the Mathematical Institute SASA
Licence: CC BY 4.0, as recorded in DOAJ
Country: Serbia

Identity and History

The journal's own account of its origins is precise. Taking into account the needs of the professional community for a journal devoted to investigations in the domain of mathematics instruction — research oriented, and promoting essentially new ideas and techniques relevant for teaching mathematics at all levels — The Teaching of Mathematics started in 1998 as a separate volume of Nastava Matematike, a pedagogical journal in Serbian that had been edited since 1952. The new title was the international, English-facing companion to that long-running Serbian practitioner journal: same society, same city, but a research remit and an international authorship from the start. Its first number carried papers by I. R. Shafarevich, J. Cofman and M. Marjanović, among others — a signal of the level at which the journal intended to operate.

The founding editor was Milosav M. Marjanović, who led the journal from 1998 to 2023 — a quarter-century editorship that gave the title unusual continuity. The current editors are Rade Živaljević of the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) and Zoran Kadelburg of the University of Belgrade, and the editorial advisory board is international in composition: members are based at the University of Joensuu in Finland, the University of Belgrade, MiraCosta College in California, Moscow State University, the University of Tsukuba in Japan and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. That board composition mirrors the journal's readership — a Central and Eastern European mathematics-education community in conversation with colleagues in Western Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States.

The journal's internal architecture, described in its own early presentation, divides its contents into teaching and learning mathematics in grades 1–8, teaching and learning in grades 9–12, teaching and learning at universities, and teaching and learning computer sciences, together with standing departments for a featured lecture (“My lecture”), a Problems section, material from the history of mathematics, and information on the activities of the Mathematical Society of Serbia. Few journals keep a problems department and a history strand alongside research articles; here they are part of the founding design, reflecting a society journal that serves teachers and researchers in the same pages.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The scope can be stated in the journal's own terms: all contributed papers containing essentially new ideas and techniques relevant for teaching of mathematics at all levels, recommended by its referees, will be considered for publication; papers containing subject analysis of teaching themes and new ways of their modelling are particularly welcomed. Two things follow from that wording. First, the journal is about mathematics education as a research field — the analysis of mathematical content for teaching, the design of instruction, the study of learning — not about mathematics research itself, and not about classroom anecdote. A paper proving a new theorem belongs elsewhere; a paper analysing how a theorem, a concept or a standard school topic can be understood, sequenced and taught belongs here. Second, “at all levels” is meant literally: the grades 1–8 and 9–12 strands, the university strand and the computer-science strand sit side by side, so work on early number learning and work on university analysis teaching share one venue.

OpenAlex's topic mapping of the journal's indexed output tells the same story from the citation side: its largest topic clusters are mathematics education and teaching techniques, mathematics education and pedagogy, and the history and theory of mathematics, with smaller clusters in mathematics and its applications and in mathematical and computational methods. The journal is also regularly reviewed in ZDM, the Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik reviewing tradition, which is the field's own abstracting channel — a sign that its contents are read as contributions to the international mathematics-education literature, not only as a national society's house journal.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

The publisher is the Mathematical Society of Serbia, Društvo matematičara Srbije, headquartered at Kneza Mihaila 35/IV in Belgrade. The society publishes the journal from its own address, answers correspondence through its own office, and distributes the journal both in print — a subscriptions page serves print subscribers — and electronically through the journal's site at teaching.math.rs and through the Electronic Library of the Mathematical Institute SASA, where the journal's archive is held. The journal states that its site was the most frequently visited among the society's mathematical journals in its early online years, a small detail that captures its position: within Serbian mathematics publishing, this is the title the community actually reads.

Editorially, the journal declares its alignment with the profession's standards: it approves and supports the Best Current Practices for Journals (2010) issued by the IMU, the world body for mathematics and the Code of Practice (2012) of the European Mathematical Society's Ethics Committee, and it maintains a dedicated publication-ethics page. Those affiliations matter for a society journal, because they bind its handling of authorship disputes, plagiarism and review conduct to documents written by the international mathematical community itself.

Peer Review, Ethics and Licensing

The author instructions are specific about review: each submitted manuscript is reviewed by at least two anonymous referees. DOAJ's record for the journal describes the process as single anonymous peer review — consistent with the instructions, since the referees are anonymous to the authors — and gives a publication time of 25 weeks. A manuscript sent to the journal must be in final form and must not be submitted elsewhere while it is under consideration. On acceptance, authors are asked to transmit the source file (.tex or .doc) by e-mail, a workflow that reflects the journal's society-publisher scale: electronic submission is by e-mail to the editorial address, with printed manuscripts still accepted at the Belgrade address as an alternative.

The economics are as simple as scholarly publishing gets. The journal states, in terms, that it does not have any article processing charges, nor article submission charges, nor a publication fee; it is fully open access, and DOAJ records its licence as CC BY 4.0. The languages of the journal are the congress languages of the IMU — DOAJ records English, German and Russian — while the author instructions ask that articles be written in English, which is the language of the journal's international record.

Metrics and Indexing

The journal's homepage carries a compact, self-critical metrics panel, and its figures can be quoted with their sources attached. Under the heading “Impact factor (ESCI)” it lists 0.2 for 2025, 0.3 for 2024, 0.2 for 2023 and 0.1 for 2022 — the journal's Journal Impact Factor in the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science. From Scopus, the same panel reports a 2025 CiteScore of 0.4, standing at the 11th percentile in Education and the 5th percentile in General Mathematics. SCImago, working from the same Scopus data, gives the journal an SJR of 0.137 and quartile Q4 for 2025, with an h-index of 10 — the same h-index carried in this JournalsWorld record. These are small numbers by the standards of large commercial fields, and the journal does not dress them up; for a specialist mathematics-education title published by a national society, an ESCI impact factor, Scopus coverage and a DOAJ listing together form a complete, verifiable indexing identity.

OpenAlex resolves both ISSNs to one source record (S2737337914), The Teaching of Mathematics, with the Mathematical Institute's electronic library as its homepage. That record held 108 works and 94 citations at checking time, with an h-index of 5 — but its year-by-year counts are visibly sparse (single works in several years), which means OpenAlex captures only part of this journal's output. The journal's own archive, running continuously since 1998, is far larger than 108 papers. The correct use of the OpenAlex record is as a floor, not a measure: the verified picture is the one given by the journal, DOAJ, Scopus and the Web of Science ESCI listing, and any single-database figure for this title should be quoted with its database named.

How to Submit

Prepare the manuscript in its final form, in English, with the components the instructions require: the title with a shortened running title; the author's name; an abstract of at most 20 lines; the 2020 AMS Mathematics Subject Classification and the MathEduc Classification, with keywords; and the author's full postal address and e-mail address. Submit electronically to the journal's editorial e-mail address given on its site (teaching at math.rs), or send the printed manuscript to Društvo matematičara Srbije, Kneza Mihaila 35/IV, P.O. Box 355, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia, ideally with an electronic version (.pdf or .doc) included. Do not submit the same manuscript elsewhere while it is under consideration. Expect anonymous review by at least two referees, and, if the paper is accepted, a request for the source file. There is no fee at any point — no submission charge, no processing charge, no publication fee — and the published article is open access under CC BY 4.0.

Similar Journals and How This One Differs

Three distinctions protect readers from the common confusions. First, the journal's own parent: Nastava Matematike is the Serbian-language pedagogical journal from which this title separated in 1998; works in Serbian addressed to practising teachers belong to the parent tradition, while The Teaching of Mathematics is the research title. Second, Teaching Mathematics and Computer Science, published by the University of Debrecen in Hungary (ISSNs 1589-7389 and 2676-8364, with its own JournalsWorld profile at post 629486), is a near-namesake with a wider brief that adds informatics education; it is a different journal in a different country. Third, the many journals worldwide whose titles combine “teaching”, “mathematics” and “education” — the identity test for this one is always the ISSN pair 1451-4966 / 2406-1077 and the Belgrade society publisher. Within its field, the journal is set apart by its society ownership, its fee-free open access, its problems and history departments, and an unbroken run since 1998 under one society's roof.

The Journal in Its Community

To understand what kind of journal this is, it helps to place it in the publishing ecology of Serbian mathematics. The Mathematical Society of Serbia is the country's professional body for mathematicians, and its journals are society instruments rather than commercial products: Nastava Matematike speaks to teachers in Serbian, and The Teaching of Mathematics carries the research conversation in English to an international readership. The division of labour has held for more than twenty-five years. The journal's own presentation notes that its electronic site was the most frequently visited of the society's journal sites — evidence that, within that ecology, the research title is not a ceremonial publication but a working one, read by the teacher-educators, curriculum writers and university lecturers who form its natural audience.

The standing departments tell the same story. A Problems section keeps the journal connected to the problem-solving culture that runs through olympiad and classroom mathematics alike; a history-of-mathematics strand gives space to the discipline's memory; and the society-information pages bind the journal to the professional life of its publisher. Research journals in mathematics education often drift towards pure theory over time. This one's structure resists that drift by design: a paper on the teaching of a school topic can sit in the same volume as a featured lecture and a set of problems, and each part addresses a different corner of the same community.

Continuity is the other defining fact. One founding editor for the journal's first twenty-five years, one publisher throughout, one address in Belgrade, and an archive that runs without a break from 1998 to the present volumes — few specialist journals in the region can show a steadier record. For librarians and indexers, that steadiness is the practical point: the title, the ISSN pair and the publisher have not changed, so a citation from any year of the journal's life resolves to the same publication.

Reading the Record Carefully

Anyone evaluating this journal from the outside should know which records describe it fully and which describe it partially. The complete record is the journal's own archive, held in the Electronic Library of the Mathematical Institute SASA, together with its DOAJ listing, which confirms the publisher, the ISSN pair, the CC BY licence, the absence of charges and the review model in a single registry entry. Scopus and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index supply the citation metrics quoted in this profile. OpenAlex, by contrast, captures only a fragment of the backfile — its counts jump from a handful of works in one year to none in the next — so its totals for this title understate the journal's real output by a wide margin. The figures in the metrics section above are therefore each tied to the database that produced them, and the h-index of 10 recorded by SCImago should not be averaged with, or replaced by, the smaller OpenAlex figure: they count different, overlapping sets of the same journal's papers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of The Teaching of Mathematics? Print ISSN 1451-4966 and online ISSN 2406-1077, as printed on the journal's own site and confirmed by its DOAJ record.

Who publishes the journal? Društvo matematičara Srbije — the Mathematical Society of Serbia — from Kneza Mihaila 35/IV, Belgrade. SCImago's listing names the same publisher.

When did the journal start? In 1998, as a separate volume of Nastava Matematike, the Serbian pedagogical journal edited since 1952. Its founder and first editor-in-chief, Milosav M. Marjanović, led it until 2023.

Does the journal charge authors? No. The journal states that it has no article processing charges, no article submission charges and no publication fee, and it is fully open access.

How are manuscripts reviewed? Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two anonymous referees, according to the author instructions; DOAJ records single anonymous peer review and a publication time of 25 weeks.

What are the journal's metrics? As reported on the journal's own homepage: an ESCI impact factor of 0.2 for 2025 (0.3 in 2024), and a Scopus CiteScore of 0.4 for 2025. SCImago gives an SJR of 0.137 (Q4) and an h-index of 10. Figures from any one database should be quoted with the database named.

Where can the journal be read? Openly, on the journal's site and through the Electronic Library of the Mathematical Institute SASA, which holds its electronic archive; print subscriptions are also offered by the society.