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Good Day All,

I am an amateur Mathematician humbly seeking your advice. I have just completed a math paper and would like someone to review it. I'm not an academic so I can't post it to sites such as arxiv.org but I can upload to vixra.org. However I'm aware vixra.org gets many crank submissions since anyone can post there. Do I have any other options or being an amateur, automatically places me in a position where I should post to sites of lower repute to have them viewed? Also, should I submit to a publisher immediately or seek to submit on a pre-printing site for review first? Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Kevin Ali
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    Find a conference that relates to the topic of your paper and submit. – davcha Jan 26 '15 at 13:59
  • @davcha - it is unlikely that a conference will accept a paper from someone who is not experienced in writing. Many reviewers will reject a paper if it is not enough well-written, which is likely to be the case. – R B Jan 26 '15 at 14:00
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    Approach a nice academic in the closest decent university to your house and get him/her to hear you out and hopefully read your paper. From then on things will be easier...or not, if you're considered a nuisance. – Timbuc Jan 26 '15 at 14:02
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    I would start by verifying the importance of the results here. It is a known problem as reviewing takes time and it is unlikely someone will be willing to spend it without you first interesting him on the topic. – R B Jan 26 '15 at 14:02
  • Keivn asks for a review. It's indeed unlikely that a conference will accept such a paper, I agree. But he does not ask "how can I be published", he just asks for a review. – davcha Jan 26 '15 at 14:03
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    @davcha - this is not the kind of review he is looking for. A poorly written paper will be rejected from a conference without any actual feedback on the results quality. – R B Jan 26 '15 at 14:05
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    user91374, I was initially advised by a math professor online to submit to arxiv.org to protect my authorship then submit to a journal. When I tried to submit to arxiv.org I realized they stopped taking submissions from 2004 unless you can be endorsed (if you are not an academic). I researched other pre-publishing sites only to realize all which are open to amateurs are considered crank polluted. I understand why academics may have this prejudice since in many cases it's true. This is a further step in my research to find an avenue for review. – Kevin Ali Jan 26 '15 at 14:06
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    I suggest that you tell us what you think you have proved, and then we can let you now if it's a publishable result (or maybe already published by somebody else). – TonyK Jan 26 '15 at 14:20
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    Get endorsed. Find someone who works in the same area of research and is an endorser. Contact this person and ask to be endorsed. – Tobias Kildetoft Jan 26 '15 at 14:57
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    Whatever you do, not do submit to http://viXra.org. – JRN Jan 29 '15 at 08:18
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    My advice (as a professor) is: (a) Try to find a mathematician near by in a relevant field to talk to, (b) Do your best to make the paper clear, and try the arxiv endorsement route (little risk). Arxiv will give publicity, but not necessarily review. If this works or not, you can submit to a journal, but feedback may be delayed and brief. Be realistic - it is rare for amateurs to get published, mostly because mathematics up to research level is difficult to self-teach. If this is the case, ask for advice on what to study. All the best! –  Jan 29 '15 at 10:02
  • Further on Joel's remark --- having a posting on vixra is a very strong indicator that you should not be taken seriously. The signal just correlates too well with crackpot-ism to ignore. – Scott Morrison Jun 22 '15 at 11:55

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Here is my comment with more details:

Quoting from https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

If you're looking for an endorsement, you can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link titled "Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract. You can then find the email addresses of the submitter on the abstract page at the top of the"Submission history" section. It's best for you to find an endorser who (i) you know personally and (ii) is knowledgeable in the subject area of your paper -- a good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another professor in your department working in your field. If you do not personally know anyone who is eligible to endorse, you can search for recent submissions in your field of interest and then verify that the submitter is eligible to endorse. It is often a good idea to send eligible endorsers a copy of your proposed submission along with the endorsement request. Please note, however, that it is inappropriate to email large numbers of potential endorsers at once, or to repeatedly email the same endorser with a request for endorsement.

I.e. pick a paper relevant to the work (possibly one you cite) and find it on the arXiv (assuming it is there). Then find an author who is an endorser using the link mentioned (may take a few tries depending on how lucky you are). Then contact this person about your work and ask to be endorsed.

Here is some general advice when asking to be endorsed:
Make sure you explain precisely in the email what results you have proven, and preferably also the methods used. This will allow the person to get a first impression on the suitability.
As part of this, make sure the paper is presented nicely (use $\LaTeX$!) You will need to show the paper to the person (it is also mentioned on the arXiv page I linked that people should not endorse someone without checking the paper). But they need not do a full review of the paper, they just need to check that it seems like you know what you are doing (this is specifically mentioned on that page). So the time requirement is not particularly high.
That said, it may still easily take you several tries to find someone who wants to take the time to look at the paper (and each one may end up taking a long time to reply, simply because this sort of request is not of the highest priority).
To mitigate the above, make sure you pick the person you can find who is the most relevant, so they can see that they have not been picked at random. It may also help if they seem unlikely to receive a lot of such requests (not sure how to gauge this though). For example, I would probably not mind looking over a paper in my field for this purpose, but I am not an endorser, so I have no idea how many such requests people typically get. It will certainly also depend on the field (I am in a field where very few amateurs publish, whereas someone in number theory will be much more likely to be swamped by requests).

Tobias Kildetoft
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  • I can't see a Professional Mathematician endorsing a stranger risking their reputation in the process, which means they will have to review my paper if they are open to endorsing, which is what I want in the first place. So it sounds like I'd be searching for Mathematicians in the field who recently published similar papers asking them to review my paper. Are mathematicians open to such requests? Do you know of anyone who has done this and it worked? Or are you suggesting it's worth a shot since my options are limited? I appreciate your response. – Kevin Ali Jan 28 '15 at 14:42
  • @KevinAli I added some more information. Since I am not an endorser myself, I don't really know how open people are to such requests. – Tobias Kildetoft Jan 29 '15 at 08:13
  • @ Tobias Thanks for all your helpful advice. I may have found someone to review the paper, through a friend. If that doesn't manifest, I'll definitely try the endorsement route and let you know what happens. Thanks again. – Kevin Ali Jan 30 '15 at 16:19
  • There is essentially no reputational risk to endorsing. At worst an arxiv moderator will revoke the endorser's ability to endorse. – Scott Morrison Jun 22 '15 at 11:53
  • @ScottMorrison Was that meant for Kevin? – Tobias Kildetoft Jun 22 '15 at 12:00
  • @Tobias, it was in reply to Kevin's first sentence. – Scott Morrison Jun 23 '15 at 07:59
  • @ScottMorrison Ahh, I see (Kevin will not be notified of the comment unless you ping him). – Tobias Kildetoft Jun 23 '15 at 08:07