TITLE: Is discrete mathematics mainstream?
QUESTION [18 upvotes]: Recently, the Department of Mathematics at
our University issued a recommendation encouraging its members
to publish their research in non-specialized, mainstream mathematical journals. For
numerical analysts this will make an additional obstacle for their promotions. But even
for discrete mathematicians this recommendation is causing concerns. 
For several top mainstream journals I checked with tools offered by MathSciNet what percentage
of discrete mathematical papers they published in recent years. Some statistics indicate that in some journals the number of papers with primary MSC classification, say 05 or 06 decreased significantly in the past 30 years. There are several possible explanations to this fact. 

The quality of research in DM is dropping.
The majority of research in discrete mathematics is so specialized that it is of no interest for the rest of mathematics
Some discrete mathematics journals attract even the best work of discrete mathematicians.  
Some top journals may be biased against discrete math.  
Maybe discrete math is no longer part of mainstream mathematics and will, like theoretical computer science, eventually develop into an independent body of research.

But the key issue is whether discrete math is nowadays perceived as mainstream mathematics.

REPLY [10 votes]: You mention numerical analysis explicitly. From my point of view, numerical analysis has a completely different set of top-flight generalist journals than traditional mathematics. People here care to publish in SIAM Review, in Inverse Problems, in the other slightly less generalist SIAM journals (just to list a few).
If I had written an excellent paper in my field, it wouldn't even cross my mind to submit it to Acta or Inventiones; I'd find it no more appropriate than, say, Nature or  The new England J of Medicine. Surely it would strike me as peculiar if someone asked me to publish in those.
Actually I think many people I meet in conferences don't even know which are the best pure-math journals. Just for fun, I tried looking on MathSciNet for papers by past or present big names in NA published in top-flight pure math journals; it took me a few minutes to find even one of them.
Does this make us a completely different discipline that lives under the same roof (and competes for the same funding and positions) as pure mathematicians? Maybe, I don't know. It's a matter of definitions. 
OK, now that I've written this, I'd better go and check scicomp.stackexchange.com --- there is not enough applied maths here. :)