[1][2] The AMS also publishes an associated online bibliographic database called MathSciNet, which contains an electronic version of Mathematical Reviews.

Mathematical Reviews was founded by Otto E. Neugebauer in 1940[3] as an alternative to the German journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik,[4] which Neugebauer had also founded a decade earlier, but which under the Nazis had begun censoring reviews by and of Jewish mathematicians.

The authors of reviews are volunteers, usually chosen by the editors because of some expertise in the area of the article.

(The Mathematics section of Referativny Zhurnal is available only in Russian and is smaller in scale and difficult to access.)

Only bibliographic information may be given when a work is in an unusual language, when it is a brief paper in a conference volume, or when it is outside the primary scope of the Reviews.