Editorial: On the Road to MSC 2020
Adam Bannister, Fabian Müller, Mark-Christoph Müller, Olaf Teschke · EMS Newsletter · 2018
Eighteen months ago, the beginning of the revision of the Mathematical Subject Classification was announced.1 Since then, the mathematical community has already contributed a number of suggestions on the public wiki available at https://msc2020.org/.In this article, we will give a brief overview of the current usage of the MSC, analyse some data related to its effectiveness and precision, relate it to topic clusters generated by data mining techniques and indicate some trends that have become visible in the course of the revision. Current usage of the Mathematical Subject Classification (MSC)While the raw scheme had already been introduced in the early volumes of Mathematical Reviews, the current shape, as a joint effort of both mathematical reviewing services, evolved in 1980.This came after an initiative of Bernd Wegner to incorporate the system into Zentralblatt MATH and to maintain regular collaborative revisions.Since then, MSC has been primarily used by MathSciNet and zbMATH reviewers and editors to classify the mathematical research literature, as well as being adapted by classical and digital libraries and journals.Several recent developments in the zbMATH database, such as author, journal and citation profiles or filter functions, have utilised the subject information beyond its original raison d'être.