Hello,


Recently, a colleague of mine pointed me to a MathSciNet review of one of my papers that is completely off the mark - it is not negative or anything like that, but it grossly misrepresents the contents of the paper (when describing the origins of the techniques and questions in the paper, for instance, as well as the "position" of the results within the current litterature and the meaning of the results themselves).


I'm not sure what I should do - actually, I probably won't do anything because the paper seems pretty inconsequential and the quality of the review most likely does not matter much. Still, the same thing could have happened with a paper I truly care about, and this led me to wondering what the proper behaviour is: should I contact the reviewer and ask him/her to retract his/her review (explaining why, of course)? Should I contact MathSciNet and let them know that I believe the review is incorrect? The first option raises some "diplomatic" problems, while the second one seems to me both to be abrupt and to waste several people's time... I think, if pressed to act, I would choose the first course of action, but I'd be grateful for any suggestions (e.g on how to say "you absolutely mangled that review!" without being rude..)


Final note: I'm asking this question anonymously because I don't have that many papers and it would be easy to identify the reviewer by looking at my MathSciNet profile, and I'm not out to embarass anyone.


Thanks for your help - if the question is inappropriate for this site then please close, of course!



A question about MathSciNet etiquette
Thanks to everyone for the advice. It seems that the question has stopped attracting new reactions, so I'll try to summarize what I took from the discussion.


* There is no way (nor should there be) or hiding the fact that I'm the one complaining about the review's quality - anyway, the reviewer signed his/her review so it would be highly discourteous to try to stay anonymous.
* In all probability the reviewer tried to do a fair job and simply failed; it does not seem unlikely that he/she would prefer to be told that the review is off the mark and have a chance to make it right. This helps prevent his/her name to be attached to an erroneous review.
* In view of all this, it seems at least courteous to begin by contacting the reviewer and explaining why the review seems wrong to me, and then give him/her a chance to correct it on his/her own (or to explain me why I misunderstood my paper, of course).
* In the course of such communication, one should as much as possible avoid being too directly critical of the original review (and remember that the reviewer wrote it on what is essentially his/her own free time!).
* If the above option does not produce the desired results, then the way to go (if sufficiently motivated!) is to contact mathrev@ams.org, explain the issues with the review, and leave it to them (at least one contributor thinks that this should be the first step, without any direct contact with the reviewer, but I do not see the downside of contacting the reviewer first and MathSciNet second).


Also, note that a somewhat similar question may be found at [How do I fix someone's published error?](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/31337/) , and that some of the advice there is relevant to the problem at hand.


Again, thanks to everyone for the advice! 


*Note possibly to be removed at a later point*: I plan to accept this answer, so that it appears first to anyone interested in a similar problem at a latter date. I'll wait a few days before doing so, that way you can let me know if this clashes with this forum's usual rules.


