Editorial

Dear Readers, Dear Colleagues,

Almost 15 years have passed since the relaunch of AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis, the journal of the German Statistical Society, as an international journal. Since then, the journal has considerably broadened its regional as well as its thematical coverage. Since 2020, the journal has been co-edited by Yarema Okhrin and Thomas Kneib. While Yarema Okhrin will continue to serve as editor, Thomas Kneib is now passing on this role to Harry Haupt. Such a change in the editorial board is a unique opportunity to reflect on changes in the profession and society that should affect the journal, and to evaluate the journal’s reputation, aims and scope. Last but not least, it is also a welcome opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to the continued success of AStA as editors, associate editors, producers, reviewers, and especially as authors.

With its three foci of statistical applications, methodology, and reviews, the journal is now well established and recognized as a relevant international journal with a stable impact factor (of 1.4 in 2022). Hence, we have decided to retain the general structure of its sections. Apart from articles devoted to these sections, AStA regularly publishes special issues edited by guest editors. Since 2010, six special issues have been published (see Kauermann et al. 2020), and two more special issues have just been published or are in preparation: A special issue on “Statistics in sports” has just appeared in the latest issue of AStA, edited by Groll and Liebl (2023), with an impressive 17 articles. At the time of writing this editorial in mid-July 2023, these 17 articles had already been cited 126 times, according to Google Scholar. This number exceeds the total number of citations in 2022. Two more special issues are forthcoming: “Bridging AI and Statistics” (edited by Rügamer and Säfken) is in preparation and “Advances in Spatial Econometrics and Geostatistics” (edited by Illian and Otto) is welcoming contributions now.

The current editorial team intends to continue this successful tradition and continues to solicit proposals of guest editors and contributors for future special issues. In addition, we now also welcome proposals for original articles with discussion and rejoinder. This format allows for a multi-faceted discussion of new statistical methods, their implementation and interpretation. A recent example is the paper by Jahn et al. (2022a) on the role of data, statistics, and decisions in a pandemic in AStA Volume 106, Issue 3, with four comments by Berger et al. (2022), Contreras et al. (2022), Höhle (2022), and Radermacher (2022), and a rejoinder by the authors (Jahn et al. 2022b).

With any of the various formats, AStA is focusing on papers addressing problems of statistical modelling and analysis motivated by substantive applications and being of broad interest to applied and theoretical statisticians alike. Applications that rely on well-established statistical methodology and do not contain an innovative methodological contribution are not within our scope. Papers on computational aspects or at the interface to data science, statistical learning and machine learning are also well within the scope of AStA while purely theoretical papers or papers with a mathematical focus are not AStA’s priority.

The new editorial team is determined to further strengthen the visibility and relevance of the journal and to continue to increase the quality and speed of the review process. For current figures on submission numbers, processing times, and full-text downloads, see the figures below. We welcome potential authors to submit their original articles to our journal and work with them to enhance the journal’s reputation in a highly competitive field. We look forward to receiving your articles, ideas, and proposals.