Four-journal survey methodology
Four-journal survey methodology
Scope
The corpus contains 1,542 journal records dated from 1 January 2023 through 13 July 2026 across Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, and Mathematics of Operations Research. Document-type review retained 1,507 research articles; corrections, notices, editorials, prefaces, and tributes remain in the audit but were excluded from problem screening.
Access and screening
Publisher full text or a DOI/title/author-matched manuscript was screened for most of the 1,040 research articles with usable text. For a documented MOR subset, the evidence source is a DOI/title/author-matched paper-text extract from the prior catalogue rather than a directly accessed manuscript. Usable text could not be obtained for 467 articles. Every access gap remains visible in the per-journal screening audit and is never interpreted as a paper with no open problem. The MOR audit includes 175 direct full texts or matched extracts and distinguishes those routes record by record.
High-recall phrase searches were followed by manual context review. A problem was retained only when the source explicitly stated a precise conjecture, unresolved mathematical question, unknown complexity classification or constant, or sharply delimited missing theorem/counterexample. Generic future-work suggestions and limitations without a crisp mathematical task were excluded.
Problem records
The combined catalogue contains 484 problems from 357 source papers. Every record has a contiguous source excerpt of at most 25 words and a two-to-four-sentence description that defines the setting, gives the relevant known boundary, and states the unresolved task. The excerpt preserves local source evidence; the normalized description is the independently readable statement. Source claims, normalized descriptions, and later-status evidence are stored separately.
Status review
Statuses were checked through 13 July 2026 with exact-statement, title/keyword, and forward-literature searches. A record is marked resolved only when a matched primary source proves, refutes, or otherwise fully settles the stated task. Partial progress requires a matched primary source to establish an explicit theorem, bound, counterexample, or special case that directly advances the task. The evidence may be later or contemporaneous with the source article; a related-paper title alone is not evidence. No resolution found is a bounded negative search result, not proof that a problem remains open.
Status totals: 446 no resolution found, 25 partial progress, 13 resolved, and 0 disputed.
Reproducibility
The public bundle includes the byte-identical combined JSON at data/catalogue.json and each journal’s inventory, screening audit, and methodology under data/audits/. Publication dates use the journal deposit’s online date when available; the MOR audit records its documented DOI-matched fallback for deposits without an online date.