Disseminating math results in an interdisciplinary journal

Question

I'm a mathematician with physics background. We recently obtained some results that, in my opinion, has interesting physics interpretations and thus deserve an interdisciplinary attention.

We already wrote a manuscript meant for a math journal. It is super technical and not friendly at all to general audience. I find that a pity, and want to write a kind of "short communication" (actually not sure about the format), in which I would avoid all the mathematical reasonings and only present the interesting interpretations that are relevant for material scientists and soft matter physicists. The purpose is to disseminate our result to a more general audience, and invite interdisciplinary collaborations.

I have no experience of such manuscript. My colleagues suggest that I should try top journals Nature or Science. But I have the concern that such a manuscript has no "original result", which seems to be required by these top journals. Then my colleagues argue that "interpretations" are original results. But I fear that most of my "interpretations" are just personal opinions and won't count as solid result.

By the way, I do see people publish "long version" then "accompanied short version", which sometimes raises the concern of dual publication. My planned "communication" won't be a short version, but a completely different paper with no overlap.

My question: What should I do in this situation? What journals welcome such manuscript (Nature and Science seems very unfriendly towards mathematics)? How do people usually disseminate technical results?

Answer 1

There are journals in physics that encourage interdisciplinary work and also mathematical physics journals. I have seen (and written) Physical Review Letters that have many pages of mathematics in a supplement. See, for example:

Colbrook, Matthew J., Bogdan Roman, and Anders C. Hansen. "How to compute spectra with error control." Physical review letters 122.25 (2019): 250201.

You might do well adding an introduction that addresses the physics and then sending to a mathematical physics journal.

Do not be afraid of covering the same material twice, however. Perhaps you write the paper as a math paper, and then a separate paper that covers in different words the same material from a physics viewpoint. You can always call it a review or guide if that makes you feel more honest. I recently employed that strategy and I hope Referee B feels this is alright.

Answer 2

It's very unusual for math papers to appear in Science or Nature, but people do occasionally publish shorter interdisciplinary math papers in PNAS (see this MO answer for some examples).

Answer 3

Forget about journals. Mathematical physicists and theoretical physicists read papers on arXiv and do not care about journals. To reach them, what matters is:

• The choice of arXiv categories. (Not trivial: for example hep-th sounds rather narrow but it is historically the first arXiv category and catches a lot of traffic.)
• Well-chosen title, abstract, introduction.
• Have a physicist give feedback before posting on arXiv. Improvements made when publishing in a journal count for little: most people who might read your paper will have already have done so by the time it is published in a journal.

For an example of a paper written by mathematicians for physicists, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05418 .

For a discussion of how arXiv is used by (many) physicists, see my blog post http://researchpracticesandtools.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-open-secrets-of-life-with-arxiv.html

Answer 4

Nature and Science will want an original result. Physical Review (B) or PRL are likely too high ranked as well. Put it in some place like J. Appl. Physics or Chemistry of Materials or J Chem Phys or Materials Theory or the like. (I don't know the specifics...of course if it involves ceramics those journals are a good fit; if it involves bio, those are good.)

I would encourage you to get it into a real journal (not Arxive). Something like a specialty APS or ACS journal. The archival is superior...ends up being put on acid-free paper and retained for hundreds of years in Harvard library. Digital storage and version control are not as good as dead trees. In addition going through peer review and a copy editor ends up almost all the time pushing a more professional product with lesser typos and the like.

I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty involved in doing what you are trying to do. For one thing the materials journal has to a bit take on faith the math efficacy (or repeat the review of that). But it's not impossible.

Also, try to show some example system and some charts versus temperature or instrument resolution or the like (even if no experiments, just "drawing spaghetti" (band diagrams). Connect it to something.