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I got this comment after more than 75 days of submission:

The considered problem in this manuscript is a practice in high mathematics and can not be a paper for publication in high-level journals.

What does it mean?

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Ooker
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Sid Brown
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    I would considered politely asking for a clarification. It is quite a cryptic message you've got there. – Gabriel Mar 16 '19 at 12:46
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    I would politely ask for a copy of the reviews sent from the reviewers to the editor. Normally, one would get a copy of those. The otherwise fluent English used in the letter suggests to me that the comment is not written by the editor but one of the reviewers. Please note that you work is not being classified as bad or wrong. Rightly or wrongly it is judged to be within the grasp of too many. While rejection is always unpleasant, you should not ignore this distinction. By the way, a 75 day wait is very short. Many manuscript take much longer to process. – Carl Christian Mar 16 '19 at 13:44
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    I would suggest against asking for a clarification. This seems like the whole text of the review. The English is lacking, but the outcome is clear: your paper is (allegedly) way too simple for this journal. Right or wrong, that's their decision. You have little to gain by arguing. After such a comment, there isn't much that you can write that would make the editor reconsider. If they had doubts about the review, they would already have invited another reviewer. Move on, and submit it somewhere else. – Federico Poloni Mar 16 '19 at 13:48
  • But the problem is - the paper in itself deals with one of the burning questions of mathematics. If it was within the grasp of too many why haven't they answered it? Further, does it also mean, all papers need to be made complex enough so that only a few "bright & privileged PHDs" should understand it? If they have taken 75 long days to "carefully" reject the paper, I feel that there is no point asking them to clarify. – Sid Brown Mar 16 '19 at 13:55
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    No, a paper need not be hard to grasp to be publishable. But it needs to deal with a problem of interest to the mathematical community, and whatever the reviewer meant precisely, it is clear that they do not believe the problem to be in this category. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:16
  • I think I have already answered that- I just want to tell you that there have been several workshops /talks that relate to the problem I am answering. – Sid Brown Mar 16 '19 at 14:23
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    Unfortunately, sometimes reviewers don't do a good job reviewing. Worse, sometimes a problem can be very tough and then seem trivial once one has seen the solution. My advice is to send the paper to another journal, probably a slightly weaker one than you saw previously, and make sure that the paper has a detailed section illustrating what prior work has been done on the problem and why people care. that should do a better job getting a reviewer to realize the paper is interesting and non-trivial. – JoshuaZ Mar 16 '19 at 16:02
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    @FedericoPoloni Asking for a clarification isn't arguing. At least, as long as the request for clarification is along the lines of "What do you mean?" rather than "Why do you say that?" – David Richerby Mar 16 '19 at 17:46
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    @SidBrown I presume you are a student at some level. Do you have an academic advisor? You should run your work by someone at your institution who can assess its quality and help you find another journal to submit to if it is appropriate to do so. Based on your comments I am worried you might not know what you are doing and without getting some help you will continue to founder. In particular, because you seem to know no journals in your area I suspect that means you have not read any academic mathematics in your area. That almost certainly means your work is not publishable. – Bryan Krause Mar 16 '19 at 19:17
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    I am aware of the journal and perfectly know what I am doing. Otherwise, I might have got rejected within weeks not months (my opinion). No I am not in an academic institution.That's the problem, some journals need affiliation, some ask for institutional email, others have other restrictions. – Sid Brown Mar 17 '19 at 05:26
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    Could you give some examples of the journals that require affiliation? Because it sounds to me like you may have misunderstood that. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 17 '19 at 07:27
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    Also a comment about timings: 75 days is actually a relatively short time in pure mathematics, where I've seen (and had) submitted papers, even short ones, take easily more than a year to review (with reviews not much more substantial than what you got). – Daniel Robert-Nicoud Mar 17 '19 at 12:39
  • In mathematics, it is customary to publish a preprint on arxiv.org before submitting to a peer-reviewed journal. Most mathematicians consider arxiv articles almost as serious as the ones published in journals, and have no problem referencing arxiv articles in their own articles. You should try there (it seems that, since you are not affiliated with an institution, you need someone to endorse your inscription to arxiv). – Taladris Mar 17 '19 at 15:17
  • @Taladris yes I did think of that, they asked for institutional affiliation then I stopped. How does that endorsement for inscription go about? – Sid Brown Mar 17 '19 at 15:26
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    arXiv has a page with all the details you need on how to get endorsed. Basically, you need to find someone who is an endorser in the category you wish to submit to and ask them to endorse you (which will mean you send them the paper and they check that it looks serious). A good way to find an endorser is to look at the authors of papers you cite and check their arXiv papers to see which ones are endorsers in which categories. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 17 '19 at 15:31
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    @SidBrown Scientific journals are well used to submissions from amateurs that claim to solve "burning questions" in all types of fields. Almost without exception, the overwhelming majority of these are deeply flawed. It's easy to make mathematics look ostensibly correct while simultaneously being completely wrong. Consider the most likely probability falling to this being the case with your article as well. – J... Mar 19 '19 at 09:35
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    @SidBrown Maybe this is too offtopic for this site, but maybe if you say what is your paper about and what are your findings people here can say how appropriate the review was. – gjulianm Mar 19 '19 at 09:52

6 Answers6

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My educated guess is that the reviewer is a native speaker of German and mistranslated some terms into English:

  • The German word Übung translates both to practice and to exercise.

  • In German universities, höhere Mathematik (literally: higher mathematics) was used as a label for mathematics courses for students of other scientific fields or engineering. At times, this only referred to the calculus courses (and not the linear-algebra courses). In particular, these courses usually focus on applying mathematical concepts and do not compare to courses for students of mathematics. (I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still find this label in use somewhere.)

If my guess is correct, the reviewers comment means something along the lines of:

This manuscript is just a (demonstrative) exercise in undergraduate mathematics and therefore not suitable for publication in a high-level journal.

So, your manuscript was rejected because it allegedly does not feature any new mathematics.

Uwe
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Wrzlprmft
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    I came to a similar conclusion without thinking about it being a translation issue: the problem is (already) a practice in {some kind of} mathematics, therefore it's not suitable as a paper for a high-level journal (which only publishes novel things). – user541686 Mar 17 '19 at 01:36
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    Incidentally the old name for calculus in Vietnamese is also "high-level math". During the Vietnam war we imported education from the USSR, so I wonder if this name also exists in Russian – Ooker Mar 17 '19 at 05:41
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    Also, the German word "betrachtet" translates to "considered" and "regarded". The usage of the first translation seems a bit strange here. – rexkogitans Mar 17 '19 at 09:42
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    This sentence would mean pretty much the same thing as your German intepretation if you translated it literally into Polish. It may be a bit of a leap, but I suppose the same is likely to be true for (most?) other central European languages. – tomasz Mar 17 '19 at 13:59
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    @Ooker It is the same in most of Central and Eastern Europe https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%8B%D1%81%D1%88%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0 – Vladimir F Героям слава Mar 17 '19 at 17:49
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Seems to me that there's a missing word, and the correct comment might be something more like:

The considered problem in this manuscript is a practice in high school mathematics and can not be a paper for publication in high-level journals.

In other words, your manuscript is too simple to be published in an academic journal.

Buffy
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Allure
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    Even then, it is a strange formulation, but I suppose the one writing it might not be great at English ("a practice" does not really make sense here on its own). – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 07:26
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    "a practice" instead of "an exercise" could be poor translation from a different language – Thomas Mar 16 '19 at 07:54
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    Could be. Or maybe they mean something like "a (standard) practice in higher mathematics." Either way, a poorly written comment indicating that the paper's contribution is not sufficiently significant. – cag51 Mar 16 '19 at 09:55
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    @cag51 This should be the answer. – Captain Emacs Mar 16 '19 at 11:53
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    @Allure So you need to get this correction to the editor, not the OP... – Solar Mike Mar 16 '19 at 12:46
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    Unfortunately it means that the manuscript is rejected. The only thing you can do is being disappointed that it took almost three months to receive an answer (that in addition might be poorly written). – Alchimista Mar 16 '19 at 13:40
  • Maybe they mean "it is a commonly used practice" in mathematics? – allo Mar 16 '19 at 19:53
  • There is nothing to suggest that "high school" is the intended meaning here. That's just wild speculation. – J... Mar 18 '19 at 13:36
  • @J... indeed, but this is a simple explanation that makes the sentence comprehensible. – Allure Mar 18 '19 at 21:26
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The considered problem in this manuscript is a practice in high mathematics...

In context, I would translate this into native English as:

In higher mathematics, the problem considered in this manuscript is just an exercise...

In other words, a routine calculation that has nothing new to say. Sorry.

TonyK
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  • Sorry that is completely wrong! – Sid Brown Mar 17 '19 at 05:37
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    @SidBrown You're asking your question because you don't know what the review means. So I don't think you're in a position to declare that interpretations of it are "completely wrong!" – David Richerby Mar 17 '19 at 21:59
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    @SidBrown this seems completely right to me. What strikes you as wrong about it? At least give some info instead of just making a statement like that – user94036 Mar 18 '19 at 02:18
  • @tonyk because the problem the manuscript deals cannot be considered just an exercise. – Sid Brown Mar 18 '19 at 05:16
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    @SidBrown With all due respect, it is clear from everything here that you have essentially no experience in publishing mathematical research. While this will not imply that your work is not good, it means that it has a lot less weight when you claim that it cannot be considered just an exercise, since this is a judgement that takes experience (though experience that is slightly tangential to actually publishing). You might be correct, but most reasonable interpretations of the reviewer message points to them disagreeing with you on this point. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 18 '19 at 09:52
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This seems really odd. Is this the journal you submitted to?

Why

  • It took 75 days to receive a 1 sentence answer in English that makes no sense.

  • Even if it was high-school level, any peer reviewer would be expected to write more than a single bad English sentence.

  • There should be multiple reviews, and the editor should have sent a single sentence review back for more details without being asked.

What to do

If you are a grad student, take this to your advisor. There is a good chance they can contact the editor, and will have more clout than you (unless you are a professor).

If you are affiliated with a university, ask others in the field about it. If there are multiple people with single sentence reviews, push back on the conference as a group.

At least reach out to the editor. Say

I'm not sure what this sentence means. This is the only review I received from my submission, and I'm not sure what it means or why my paper was rejected.

EDIT:

I thought it might be a desk rejection, but the message isn't boilerplate. I'm also not convinced the review meant "high-school".

Reasoning

  • If it was a high-school caliber entry, and the editor caught it, why not send a form letter or ignore it?

  • I have a difficult time seeing how "high-school math" can be anything but an insult. Why not just use words like stupid outright?

sevensevens
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    About the multiple reviews and just one sentence: It could be a desk rejection coming from the editor, so it may not even been sent to the reviewers. And if the paper is really bad, there's no point in writing a detailed rejection. – Massimo Ortolano Mar 16 '19 at 16:36
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    If someone sends math at high school level to a journal, why should I as a reviewer write more than one line pointing that out? If it truly is an exercise in high school math, then there is nothing that will make it publishable, and it will be a waste of my time to try to point out things that might make it so. And it is very common for even very good math journals to have just a single reviewer. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 17:15
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    Just because the journal uses English language, doesn't mean that English is necessarily the first language of any given reviewer. I also doubt that "high school" is the correct implication. I'm strongly thinking "higher mathematics". – Buffy Mar 16 '19 at 20:16
  • @Buffy - I was thinking something like that too. "Highly-theoretical" was my though. – sevensevens Mar 16 '19 at 22:01
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    @sevensevens yes that is the journal. – Sid Brown Mar 17 '19 at 05:31
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    what makes you think that it's the journal? – Ooker Mar 17 '19 at 05:49
  • @Buffy "Higher mathematics" wouldn't make sense. Why would they reject a paper for featuring advanced mathematics? – David Richerby Mar 17 '19 at 21:57
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    "High-school" isn't an insult: it's just placing the level of the work. High school students aren't stupid; the point is that school-level mathematics isn't research. – David Richerby Mar 17 '19 at 21:58
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    @DavidRicherby, If I'm right, the implication is that the things in the paper are already well known, just not known to the authors. – Buffy Mar 17 '19 at 22:14
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    @MassimoOrtolano a desk rejection after 75 days would be rather unusual. – ZeroTheHero Mar 18 '19 at 02:48
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    @Ooker ...because the letter OP posted is signed "Associate Editor, Mathematical Sciences"? – J... Mar 18 '19 at 18:16
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The editors are implying that what you have reported in your manuscript is already out there. It could be a theorem or a technique already in use by mathematicians, and therefore cannot be published as your research finding now.

g4th
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  • Welcome to Academia.SE. As you can see, many other answers have already made this point -- it is considered better practice to upvote existing answers rather than posting a new, duplicate answer. – cag51 Mar 20 '19 at 18:06
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The considered problem in this manuscript is a practice in high mathematics and can not be a paper for publication in high-level journals

Probably he means "high school". But, Gauss found many solutions in his high school years... Nobody exactly defined where "high school" ends. Because in my high school, I modelled Frank-Hertz experiment. With complicated enough approach this could become Plasma Physics article, enough for publication in any scientific grade journal.

Another probability is that they think subject lies in field of "high mathematics", and they understand it as "mathematical analysis". It exists in some high school programs, but generally considered university discipline, rather then school. Again, it is actually possible to create problem inside mathematical analysis and solve it, creating material of grade which is enough for publication anywhere.

Also you can always publish it in journals for PhD/high school students, which have lower bounds for inclusion of articles.

Not explaining what exactly in your result did not fit into bounds for publication is nonsense. Such uncompetent staff which doesn't even bother to explain the subject of article should be fired because most probably their PhD degree was bought (remember how french physicists had bought degrees in 90s and after great scandal they were both fired and their works disqualified).

sanaris
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  • But I am looking for a peer-reviewed journal. Does anyone know of other peer-reviewed math journals in Europe with a great reputation? – Sid Brown Mar 16 '19 at 13:44
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    @SidBrown Other than which one? You have not specified which one this was, and I am really not sure why it would matter that the journal is in Europe. But even with that somewhat unusual requirement, there are plenty to choose from. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 13:53
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    Your comment about "high mathematics" and "mathematical analysis" show that you have no idea about what math research is about, so your advise is unlikely to be very helpful. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 13:57
  • Correct me if I am wrong but in most of the journals I find the label Springer - I am seeking for math journals that are not related to them and would prefer those from the outside of USA. Another paper their comment - Due to the long queue of papers waiting to be dealt with, we can not accept your submission to (name deleted) Journal. We are giving priority to papers fully fitting the area editors' scientific interests. I apologize for this but I hope you can understand that this is made for speeding up the publication process. Your paper will be removed from the web editorial system. – Sid Brown Mar 16 '19 at 14:02
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    Why on earth would "high mathematics" mean "mathematical analysis"? Why that specific subbranch of mathematics and not one of the other ones? I mean, "higher category theory" at least contains the word "high". – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:03
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    Ohh, and since I post here under my actual name, you are free to look up my publication record in mathematics since you seem to think I have no idea what that is about. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:04
  • @SidBrown Sure, many of them are published by Springer. But also many are not. Again, your wish to use one outside USA is very weird, but if you really want that, just pick pretty much any of the major society journals (London, European, German (i.e. Documenta), etc.). – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:05
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    If you think "mathematical analysis" is all math beyond the elementary math, then that reinforces my point that you really have no idea what you are talking about in this context and that whatever advise you offer is not going to be very valuable. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:09
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    I am not trolling. But anyone with a decent background in math will find it absurd to guess "mathematical analysis" from "high math". Because the only way that will happen is that the person making the guess has never been exposed to math beyond that and thinks that it must be the pinnacle of math. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:13
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    (calling it "mathematical analysis" as opposed to just "analysis" is also bit of a give-away). – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 14:15
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    @TobiasKildetoft Because in high schools, the only math in program is either elementary math or "high math", which includes integration, numerical methods - like casual "calculus", plus simple complex function knowledge. Calling it mathematical analysis would be overlap, but in few countries "high math" was the term for mathematical analysis in universities. So in language of unprepared speaker this is understandable by professionals, but it could not be used in official letters, as it is not widely accepted term. – sanaris Mar 16 '19 at 14:25
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    @TobiasKildetoft: For whatever it’s worth, German universities used to split their basic mathematics curriculum (usually for students of other sciences or engineering AFAIK) into lineare Algebra (linear algebra) and höhere Mathematik, with the latter literally meaning higher mathematics and practically being (infinitesimal) calculus. The modern name for these courses and the German word for calculus is Analysis. So, with a few translation errors (that should not happen to a professional mathematician nowadays), you indeed get high mathematics = mathematical analysis. – Wrzlprmft Mar 16 '19 at 16:08
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    @Wrzlprmft I agree with that possible interpretation, but jumping from there to "mathematical analysis" requires no familiarity with math at this level. I see no reason to expect this to be true of the reviewer, but I found it necessary to point out that it holds for the answerer here, since they are providing bad advice based on not knowing anything about this sort of situation. – Tobias Kildetoft Mar 16 '19 at 17:16
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    @SidBrown From the rejection note you've already received, aiming for journals "with a great reputation" sounds like it's aiming much too high. – David Richerby Mar 16 '19 at 17:45