Opportunity to Participate in the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue of the Constraints journal
Eugene Freuder
Opportunity to Participate in the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue of the Constraints journal
I am editing a special Thirtieth Anniversary Issue of the Constraints journal. Authors of papers that have received 150 or more citations in Google Scholar are invited to contribute a “commentary” on their paper.
Constraints has averaged around one such paper a year (though, of course, older papers are more likely to have reached that milestone). Constraints has averaged around one paper per issue with 50 or more Google Scholar citations. I believe these statistics speak well for the journal.
This initiative follows in the spirit of an online volume celebrating the 25th anniversary of the CP conference, which in turn was inspired by a retrospective on the first fifty volumes of the Artificial Intelligence journal. These can both serve as inspiration for the kinds of commentaries that are possible. For example, Alan Mackworth and I supplied the commentary “The complexity of constraint satisfaction revisited” for the Artificial Intelligence retrospective. (Free access to Artificial Intelligence is available if you need it.)
Commentaries can explore many topics, or a combination of topics, related to the original paper. A discussion of how the work was developed could be particularly interesting and instructive, especially for younger researchers. Commentaries might describe a eureka moment when the authors came up with the idea for the paper, or a months long process of trial and error. Commentaries could point to the work the authors have done extending the results in the original paper, or the work that others have done citing the paper. Authors might write about what they wish they had done at the time, or connections and implications that have arisen that they did not foresee at the time. They might call attention to questions that remain open and avenues that remain to be explored. The commentaries are not intended for primary research or secondary analysis of primary research, and will not be peer reviewed.
If you wish to participate:
Use Google Scholar’s search or Advanced Search to find if any of your Constraints papers have 150 or more citations.
For any or all that do:
1. Send an email to m...@freuder.me with “anniversary” in the subject line, and the name of the Constraints paper in the body.
2. Contact any co-authors to see if they want to participate with you. (One commentary per paper.)
3. Submit the commentary to Constraints for the Thirtieth Anniversary special issue.
Submissions should be no more than 10 pages long. They should cite your original paper.
Submission Deadline: May 15, 2026