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I'm a mathematician and I love using the MathSciNet and zbMATH databases to trawl through the literature, find new papers, and generate citations. So in my own papers, in my own bibliography, it makes sense to mention the zbMATH and MR numbers of every paper I cite: I believe that bibliographies should be maximally useful.

The problem is that when I generate a citation using zbMATH, it only has the zbMATH number, not the MR number. (And vice versa.) I could find the other number by just looking up the article in the other database, but that's more effort than I'm willing to put into this.

Question: Given a zbMATH number, is there an easy way to identify the corresponding MR number of the underlying article, if it exists? (And vice versa, MR to zbMATH.)

Somehow I suspect that neither MathSciNet nor zbMATH maintains these cross-references. It's not in their interest (especially for MathSciNet) because it would make it easy for users to switch from one database to another, risking a "day of reckoning" when the mass of users finally come to prefer one of these nearly identical objects over the other. (And with zbMATH being free, it could very well win out . . .)

So I don't have much hope, but hopefully someone will pleasantly surprise me!

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I work for MathSciNet as an editor, and I don't know of any such tool that does exactly what you suggest, or plans to make one.

However, if you already have a full citation for an article, e.g. from zbMath, you can use the MRef reference matching tool to easily look up the MR number (no login needed). This is the same algorithm that MathSciNet uses to add MathSciNet links to reference lists, and it's generally very accurate even with incomplete data (though it occasionally gives false match if you try to look up an arXiv preprint that hasn't been published yet and so isn't in MathSciNet).

(A quick google also led me to GetMRef, a github repository that automates this process, but I have no experience using it.)

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    Thanks, I think this is about as good as I could ask for. Truly a marvelous tool! I realized that zbMATH must have a similar tool, and indeed they do: zbmath.org/citationmatching
    – user134824
    Commented Aug 3 at 13:52
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    Yes, MRef is a fantastic tool, and should be better publicized!
    – Alison Miller
    Commented Aug 3 at 17:06

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