Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications (SIGMA)

SIGMA is a refereed online open access journal for publication of papers in the following areas:

Geometrical methods in mathematical physics
Lie theory and differential equations
Classical and quantum integrable systems
Dynamical systems and chaos
Exactly and quasi-exactly solvable models
Lie groups and algebras, representation theory
Orthogonal polynomials and special functions
Quantum algebras, quantum groups and noncommutative geometry
Supersymmetry and supergravity, strings and branes
Cosmology and quantum gravity

Editors

Editor: Anatoly Nikitin (Institute of Mathematics, Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine)

Associate Editors: Vyacheslav Boyko, Roman Popovych, Iryna Yehorchenko, Alexander Zhalij

Executive Assistant: Vira Pobyzh

SIGMA is owned, operated and funded by researchers of the Department of Applied Research, Institute of Mathematics of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 3 Tereshchenkivs'ka Street, Kyiv 4, 01601 Ukraine

Editorial Board

Mark Ablowitz (University of Colorado, USA)
Mark Adler (Brandeis University, USA)
Alexander Andrianov (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia)
Martin Bojowald (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Francesco Calogero (University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy)
Peter Clarkson (University of Kent at Canterbury, UK)
Edward Corrigan (University of York, UK)
Boris Dubrovin (International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)
Charles Dunkl (University of Virginia, USA)
Michael Eastwood (University of Adelaide, Australia)
László Fehér (Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Budapest and University of Szeged, Hungary)
Athanassios Fokas (University of Cambridge, UK)
Allan Fordy (University of Leeds, UK)
Basile Grammaticos (Université Paris VII, France)
Rod Gover (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Jacques Hurtubise (McGill University, Montreal, Canada)
Niky Kamran (McGill University, Montreal, Canada)
Boris Khesin (University of Toronto, Canada)
Evgueni Khruslov (Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics, Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Anatol Kirillov (Kyoto University, Japan)
Anatoliy Klimyk (Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyiv, Ukraine)
Tom Koornwinder (Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach (École Polytechnique, France)
Alan Kostelecky (Indiana University, USA)
Petr Kulish (Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St.Petersburg, Russia)
Robert Mann (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Alexander Mikhailov (University of Leeds, UK)
Willard Miller, Jr. (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA)
Robert Minlos (Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Moscow, Russia)
Robert Moody (University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada)
Mikhail Olshanetsky (Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia)
Peter Olver (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA)
Jiri Patera (Centre de recherches mathematiques, Montreal, Canada)
Orlando Ragnisco (Universita di Roma 3, Italy)
Tudor Ratiu (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Carlo Rovelli (Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy, Marseille, France)
Simon Ruijsenaars (University of Leeds, UK)
Israel Michael Sigal (University of Toronto, Canada)
Andrei Smilga (Universite de Nantes, France)
Daniel Sternheimer (Universite de Bourgogne, Dijon, France and Keio University, Yokohama, Japan)
Kanehisa Takasaki (Kyoto University, Japan)
Arkady Tseytlin (Imperial College, London, UK and Lebedev Institute, Moscow, Russia)
Alexander Varchenko (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
Pavel Winternitz (Centre de recherches mathematiques, Montreal, Canada)

Authors who wish to have their manuscript handled by a specific member of the Editorial Board should so notify the Editorial Office at the time of submission.

How to Submit an Article

Submitting a paper to the journal can be performed in two easy ways:

submit the paper to the arXiv.org and send the archive number to sigma@imath.kiev.ua or
send zipped paper in TeX/LaTeX format directly to sigma@imath.kiev.ua (please include PDF or PostScript file as well).

Your article may be prepared for submission in any TeX-style you like. Though we would like to point out that after the paper is accepted for publication you should prepare the paper in accordance to SIGMA style (which can be downloaded from here).

Please indicate in your submission if your paper is intended for a specific special issue of SIGMA.

If within two working days you have not received a confirmation that we have received your paper, please resend it to our alternative address sigmajournal@gmail.com

The length of an article is not limited.

The average time of the paper processing, from submission of the paper to appearing of the paper on the journal's web site is 2-3 months, but this essentially depends on the subject and length of the article, so in some cases this time can be longer.

The papers are considered for publication if they have not been published previously and are not submitted for publication elsewhere.

Paper Evaluation Criteria

SIGMA has two article styles: regular article and review article.

Manuscripts submitted as regular articles are expected to be
- new and original;
- well organized and clearly written;
- of interest to the science community;
- not published previously or not under consideration for publication in any other journal or book.

Review articles are welcome too. Review articles are critical evaluations of material that has already been published. By organizing, integrating and evaluating previously published material, the author of a review article considers the progress of current research toward clarifying a problem. In a sense, a review article is tutorial in that the author
- defines and clarifies the problem;
- summarizes previous investigations in order to inform the reader of the state of current research;
- identifies relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the literature;
- and suggests a next step or steps in solving the problem.

Refereeing Papers for SIGMA

All the papers submitted to SIGMA are sent for reviewing to 2-3 experts in the specific areas for evaluation according to the above criteria. These referees can either review the papers themselves or recommend other reviewer(s).

To ensure comprehensive reviewing and to avoid conflicts of interest we choose the reviewers having in mind:

not to involve as reviewers people that were co-authors of any of the paper's author; moreover, we try to ensure that a reviewer and an author of the paper are not co-authors of the same person.
a reviewer of a paper should not be a co-author of another reviewer of the same paper; moreover, we try to ensure that the reviewers of the paper are not co-authors of the same person.

We strive to ensure adequate reviewing and selection process. At the moment around 50 percent of the submitted papers are declined, most of the accepted papers have been corrected in accordance with referees' recommendations.

Our policy is to send all the reviews to the authors as (i) they are written by experts; (ii) and we believe that people need to know alternative opinions on their research. We believe that a constructive review is more beneficial for research than just support of the paper that may be improved.

On the other side, we welcome constructive and substantial reviews (we point out once more that we guarantee anonymity of the reviewers' identity).

We monitor any possibilities for conflict of interest at selection of the reviewers, but ask to inform us if such conflict arises.

Please contact the Editors sigma@imath.kiev.ua for any questions about the editorial process and our refereeing policy.

Special thematic issues in SIGMA

SIGMA welcomes proposals from potential Guest Editors for special thematic issues of the journal, in particular conference/workshop proceedings, issues for anniversaries, etc.

We would like to stress that all papers in the special issues should be original: they should not be simply reviews of authors' own work that is already published elsewhere. Publication will be done only on the results of the peer review according to regular refereeing rules of SIGMA (see the items above).

If you have any ideas for special issue in SIGMA, please contact us sigma@imath.kiev.ua for further consideration.

SIGMA is arXiv overlay

That means that all published articles in the journal have been contributed or will be contributed to the arXiv. In addition, SIGMA web site has hyperlinks to arXiv copies.

You can also search or browse SIGMA articles within the arXiv, for example by following this link. As a consequence of the overlay arrangement, SIGMA shares the commitment of the arXiv itself to remain permanently and freely available on the Internet.

If a paper accepted for publication is already in the arXiv, the author should give to the Editors both the paper number and the password so that we can replace it with the typeset version.

In addition, SIGMA is reviewed by MathSciNet, Zentralblatt MATH and indexed in CrossRef and Directory of Open Access Journals.

Copyright Issues

The authors retain ownership of the copyright with respect to their papers published in SIGMA under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.

Back to the SIGMA main page.