About MathSciNet
MathSciNet from the American Mathematical Society is the leading mathematics indexing and abstracting database. It provide abstracts from more than 3100 mathematics and statistics journals and many thousands of books, conference proceedings, theses, and technical reports indexes. MathSciNet goes beyond simple bibliographic information, it also incorporates the content of the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews. These article reviews are written by experts in the article's mathematical content and exist for a significant percentage of the papers in the database, including many from as far back as 1940s.
How to Search MathSciNet for Statistics
Searching MathSciNet is very similar to using advanced searches in library catalogs or databases. It provides users the ability to search publications, authors, journals, or citations. What sets MathSciNet's search apart from many other databases, is its unique identification of authors and articles, and its use of the MSC (mathematical subject classification) system. MSC is what allows for identification of statistical publication, all you have to do is include the MSC value of 62, or one of its children such as 62F15 for Bayesian inference, as a part of your search.
Upon visiting MathSciNet you will be presented with a search bar. If you know the name of an author or an article title you can start typing it into the search bar, but if you are doing a wider search you will have to use field codes.
For example if you wanted to know what articles Kimberly Weems wrote about parametric inference robustness then I would use the query:
au:"Weems Kimberly Sherrille" AND pcsc:"62F35"
Where au:"" is the author field, and when I start typing in Kimberly Weem's name it provides me with a drop down of author names and I chose Weems Kimberly Sherrille.
Then I type AND followed by pcsc:"62F35" to search the Mathematics Subject Classification Primary and Secondary for the subject Robustness and adaptive procedures (parametric inference). This is the results:
Do not worry about having to remember a bunch of field names, clicking on Show All Fields and then clicking on the field you want it will auto-populate in the search bar. You can also click the Show Classic Interface link which brings up a traditional advanced search with drop down menus for field searching.
If you think you will need to do the same search regularly, MathSciNet allows you to Pin any search. Just click on Search History, choose the search you want, and click the Pin button on the right hand side.
MathSciNet has also made major progress in solving a major problem in database searching: telling author's with the same name apart from one another. MathSciNet accomplishes this by assigning unique identification numbers to each author. You can search for a specific author by clicking the Author tab on the MathSciNet home page and then use their name or their ID number (if known).
Clicking on an author's name elsewhere in the database will also bring you to their MathSciNet profile. If you are the author of a mathematics paper indexed in MathSciNet, you will also have an author profile which you can log into and add a photo too or otherwise edit.
The Journals tab provides the ability to search for publications by name or ISSN.
The results link to a journal profiles with information about the publisher, previous journal names, dates of publication, and how it is indexed in MathSciNet. You will also find links to issues and articles, citation data, and RSS feeds you can subscribe to which will alert you when MathSciNet adds new articles from the journal.
