In this paper a thorough analysis is carried out of the type of order reduction
that Lawson methods exhibit when used to integrate nonlinear initial boundary
value problems. In particular, we focus on nonlinear reaction-diffusion problems, and therefore, this study is important in a large number of practical
applications modeled by this type of nonlinear equations. A theoretical study of
the local and global error of the total discretization of the problem is carried out,
taking into account both, the error coming from the space discretization and
that due to the integration in time. These results are also corroborated by the
numerical experiments performed in this paper.
