#### Volume 5, issue 2 (2001)

 1 E Arbarello, M Cornalba, The Picard groups of the moduli spaces of curves, Topology 26 (1987) 153 MR895568 2 D Auroux, Symplectic 4–manifolds as branched coverings of $\mathbb{CP}^2$, Invent. Math. 139 (2000) 551 MR1738061 3 D Auroux, L Katzarkov, Branched coverings of $\mathbb{C}\mathrm{P}^2$ and invariants of symplectic 4–manifolds, Invent. Math. 142 (2000) 631 MR1804164 4 W Barth, C Peters, A Van de Ven, Compact complex surfaces, Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete (3) 4, Springer (1984) MR749574 5 S Donaldson, I Smith, Lefschetz pencils and the canonical class for symplectic four-manifolds, Topology 42 (2003) 743 MR1958528 6 S K Donaldson, Lefschetz pencils on symplectic manifolds, J. Differential Geom. 53 (1999) 205 MR1802722 7 H Endo, Meyer's signature cocycle and hyperelliptic fibrations, Math. Ann. 316 (2000) 237 MR1741270 8 R Fintushe, R Stern, Counterexamples to a symplectic analogue of a theorem of Arakelov and Parsin, preprint (1999) 9 R E Gompf, The topology of symplectic manifolds, Turkish J. Math. 25 (2001) 43 MR1829078 10 J Harer, The second homology group of the mapping class group of an orientable surface, Invent. Math. 72 (1983) 221 MR700769 11 J Harris, I Morrison, Moduli of curves, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 187, Springer (1998) MR1631825 12 A K Liu, Some new applications of general wall crossing formula, Gompf's conjecture and its applications, Math. Res. Lett. 3 (1996) 569 MR1418572 13 F Luo, A presentation of the mapping class groups, Math. Res. Lett. 4 (1997) 735 MR1484704 14 Y Matsumoto, Lefschetz fibrations of genus two – a topological approach, from: "Topology and Teichmüller spaces (Katinkulta, 1995)", World Sci. Publ., River Edge, NJ (1996) 123 MR1659687 15 D McDuff, D Salamon, A survey of symplectic 4–manifolds with $b^{+}=1$, Turkish J. Math. 20 (1996) 47 MR1392662 16 J W Morgan, Z Szabó, Homotopy $K3$ surfaces and mod 2 Seiberg–Witten invariants, Math. Res. Lett. 4 (1997) 17 MR1432806 17 B Ozbagci, Signatures of Lefschetz fibrations, Pacific J. Math. 202 (2002) 99 MR1883972 18 U Persson, Chern invariants of surfaces of general type, Compositio Math. 43 (1981) 3 MR631426 19 B Siebert, G Tian, On hyperelliptic $C^{\infty}$–Lefschetz fibrations of four-manifolds, Commun. Contemp. Math. 1 (1999) 255 MR1696101 20 I Smith, Gauge theory and symplectic linear systems, in preparation 21 I Smith, Geometric monodromy and the hyperbolic disc, Q. J. Math. 52 (2001) 217 MR1838364 22 I Smith, Serre-Taubes duality for pseudoholomorphic curves, Topology 42 (2003) 931 MR1978044 23 I Smith, Symplectic geometry of Lefschetz fibrations, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1998) 24 I Smith, Lefschetz fibrations and the Hodge bundle, Geom. Topol. 3 (1999) 211 MR1701812 25 A I Stipsicz, On the number of vanishing cycles in Lefschetz fibrations, Math. Res. Lett. 6 (1999) 449 MR1713143 26 A I Stipsicz, Indecomposability of certain Lefschetz fibrations, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 129 (2001) 1499 MR1712877 27 C H Taubes, The Seiberg-Witten and Gromov invariants, Math. Res. Lett. 2 (1995) 221 MR1324704