Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial: Year 2018 report

2019; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bimj.201900069

1521-4036

Marco Alfò, Dankmar Böhning,

Data Analysis with R

Biometrical Journal (BIMJ) publishes papers on statistical methods and their applications in life sciences including medicine, environmental sciences, and agriculture. Methodological developments should be motivated by an interesting and relevant problem from these areas. Ideally, the manuscript should include a description of the problem and a section detailing the application of the new methodology to the problem. Case studies, review articles, and letters to the editors are also welcome. Biometrical Journal is edited in cooperation with the German (http://www.biometrische-gesellschaft.de/) and the Austro-Swiss (https://www.ibs-roes.org/) Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS, see also http://www.biometricsociety.org/). In editing BIMJ, the editorial board plays a crucial role. At present, the EB includes 35 Associate Editors, with expertise in a range of methodological and applied areas. For all the work of the editorial board (EB) members, we deeply wish to thank each of them. Four members of the EB, Todd Alonzo, Harald Binder, Maria Giovanna Ranalli, and Martin Schumacher, decided that their period as Associate Editors for the BIMJ has come to an end, and we take this opportunity to utmostly thank all of them for their great and outstanding contribution to the success of the Journal. We will clearly miss them. At the same time, we have the opportunity to welcome four new AEs: Andriy Bandos (Pittsburgh), Rachael Hughes (Bristol), Nicola Salvati (Pisa), and Timo Schmid (Berlin). To them and to all the other AEs who decided to continue to collaborate with us during the new year and to promote the quality of BIMJ, we send our warmest welcome and wish for a successful work. We also thank all the reviewers who have spent their time and expertise on a voluntary basis to help improve our peer review process. The names of all referees serving during 2018 will be listed in the May 2019 issue. Our Reproducible Research Editor, Dr. Fabian Scheipl, has worked with great skill, organization, and dedication to the increasingly important issue of reproducibility in biomedical research, and reached a number of important results in this context. He has been supported by Fabian Raters (Göttingen, Germany), Annika Hoyer (Düsseldorf, Germany), and Tore Erdmann (Pisa, Italy); to all of them, we express our sincerest gratitude. We have continued our collaboration with Danielle Flemming, our Wiley contact of the Journal, and Monika Kortenjann who is the responsible for the Editorial Office of BIMJ. Without both of them, BIMJ would have never been the lovely place it is. In 2018, 390 new manuscripts were submitted to BIMJ, a value that is considerably larger than the 328 received in 2017 (+18.9%), and we hope we have been successful in associating an increasing quality of accepted manuscripts to this increasing trend in the number of submissions. Out of the 390 submissions, 331 are Research Papers, representing approximately the 84.9% of the total; further article types are Short Communications (24, 6,15%), Case Studies (5, 1.3%), Review Articles (14, 3.6%), Book Reviews (9, 2.3%), or Letters to the Editor (4, 1.0%). The Biometrical Journal received submissions from around 50 countries, with the largest number coming from the United States (19.2%), followed by Germany (12.1%), China (6.9%), Iran (5.4%), Brasil and India (each with approximately 5.0%), the United Kingdom (4.6%) and Italy (4.4 %). Each of the remaining countries contributed for less than 3.5% to new submissions. Table 1 shows the distribution of 2017 new manuscript submissions by geographic region. The status of the 390 manuscripts received during 2018 is summarized in Table 2. We see that, at the time of writing this report, we have a final decision for 248 manuscripts, while 142 are either under review with an Associate Editor (AE, 34) or under revision (82, 26) with the authors. Therefore, the rejection rate is approximately equal to 59%, a value that is consistent with evidence from previous years. It should be noticed that, while the “Immediate Reject” decision is specific to the Co-editor, the “Reject” one may not be based on a standard review process, as the Co-editor may ask the appropriate AE to support him with the assessment of the manuscript quality before entering the revision process. In 2018, the Biometrical Journal has continued the tradition of providing fast and high-quality reviews. The observed review times are among the best in the statistics context, and we should be grateful to our AEs and Reviewers for their dedication to this purpose. Figure 1 displays the Kaplan–Meier survival curve estimates for time to first decision for all the manuscripts submitted in 2015–2018, stratified by year. As it can be easily noticed, in the last four years, there has been a strong commitment to return to authors a more accurate and timely feedback, in order to establish BIMJ as one of the leading journals in applied statistics and biometry. The corresponding median times have remained unchanged, with a value of 48 days in 2015, 48 days in 2016, 50 days in 2017 and 16 days in 2018. We have always to keep in mind that the last figure is obviously biased downwards as it does not consider papers still in revision with (potentially) higher times to first decision. We should also mention that, during these years, the Co-editors and all the members of the EB have tried to establish an increasingly close connection, with the aim at making each decision more effective and shared. This has helped us to hold the time to first decision as low as possible for those papers with evident problems in the requirements that are explicitly mentioned in the scope and aims of BIMJ. The policy of special issues has continued to develop in the last years, and has proven to be an effective promotional strategy for the Journal. In 2018, volume 60 has included one special issue from the ISCB2016 conference (vol. 60, 2), guest edited by Nigel Stallard (Warwick) and dedicated to the memory of Daniel Sargent. Further special issues are in production, namely those coming from ISCB2017 (Vigo) conference, from CEN-ISBS 2017 (held in Vienna), “Predictive biostatistic models in health” from EMR-IBS2017 (Thessaloniki), and MCP 2017 (Riverside). We remind that, while these special issues naturally arise from conferences, they have always been open to contributions not coming from the conference itself and that the themes have always been taken as specific as possible. We have tried and are currently trying to strengthen the role of special issues guest editors (as for the AEs) in the decision process, in order to help increase the quality of submissions and finalize the special issues. In 2017, we presented a new section in BIMJ, the discussion papers, with the aim of addressing biometric problems of wide and current interest. In our perspective, these should be supplemented with a discussion by experts in the field in a way that the topic is made accessible to a wider audience and readership; following this path, the target is not only the academic community but also the wider community of biometric practitioners. The series has continued in 2018 with the paper “When should meta-analysis avoid making hidden normality assumptions?” by Dan Jackson and Ian R. White. For this second attempt, we have received 16 short manuscripts in the form of comments/contributions to the general discussion, followed by the reply of the authors. In 2018, a further section “Biometry in practice”, edited by Willi Sauerbrei and Andrea Berghold, was started. It derives from a series of lectures called “Education for statistics in practice” hosted by the German Region of the International Biometric Society (DR-IBS) at its annual meetings. This series is aimed at researchers that are primarily interested in the application of sophisticated statistical methods to real life science data. Over the years, several colleagues expressed a strong interest to have a presentation in the Statistics in Practice field. Due to this evidence, the editors and the publisher of the Biometrical Journal agreed to start this new series to give presenters the possibility to publish a detailed paper of the topic. BIMJ has devoted strong efforts to promote the Reproducible Research (RR) principle, see Hothorn et al. (Biometrical Journal, 51(4), 553–555, 2009) and Hofner et al. (Biometrical Journal, 58(2), 416–427, 2016); it is therefore a strict requirement that the integrity of the methods published in BIMJ is well demonstrated and that readers can use and apply the methods. Therefore, the editors usually ask authors to submit programs and data as supplementary information, according to the guidelines available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1521-4036/homepage/ForAuthors.html, to demonstrate the reproducibility of results detailed in the manuscript. Due to the efforts of BIMJ over the last years, the number of manuscripts that are reproducible has continuously increased. An analysis of common reproducibility issues has been discussed by Hofner et al. (2009). Based on these findings, updated guidelines for structuring code submission to the BIMJ have been established with the aim of helping authors in this respect. We hope to be more effective and to establish BIMJ as the first applied statistics and biometry media to have an almost 100% of the published manuscripts completely reproducible by interested readers.