For Referees

Our Referees are an under-appreciated, unrewarded, and unpaid army of volunteers who generously invest their invaluable time and effort to evaluate papers by our fellow mathematicians. The truth is that they are our most valuable assets and we are grateful to them.

Yes, yes, and yes, we agree that no mathematician worth his salt needs to be told how to referee. Still, please try to read our humble requests below.

We ask our Referees to apply the QINC principle as in the Quality of the exposition, the potential Impact of the paper, the Novelty of the results, and Carefulness of the authors.

As noted in our Guidelines for Authors, we don't expect perfection from the authors but we don't tolerate sloppiness and we ask our Referees to keep this in mind.

We assume that all our authors are honest and no intentional plagiarism ever takes place but it could even happen unintentionally so we will appreciate if our Referees notify us if they observe such instances. It can be part of the report or it could be communicated directly to AAT.

We beg our Referees not to use offensive language in their reports. If they are disturbed or upset for whatever reason, they can directly vent their frustration to AAT.

We also ask our Referees to treat the paper they receive from us as confidential information not to be used in their own research unless permission is given by the authors.

Since the refereeing process is anonymous, our Referees can have discussions with the authors via AAT.

Finally, the question of AI or not AI arises. We have seen quite a few entertaining reports generated by AI but we have yet to encounter AI reports that reliably evaluate the correctness of a paper. We have no doubt that AI is capable of doing this but we recommend to exercise extreme caution.