Guide for Referees

1. Suitability for JABES

The Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES) publishes papers of immediate and practical value to applied researchers and statistical consultants in the agricultural sciences, the biological sciences (including biotechnology) and the environmental sciences (including those dealing with natural resources). Only papers addressing applied statistical problems will be considered. Interdisciplinary papers as well as papers that illustrate the application of new and important statistical methods using real data are strongly encouraged.

For regular papers, a motivating example should be presented early in the paper. The statistical development should then be presented, and the results applied to the example. Expository, review, and survey articles addressing broad-based statistical issues are encouraged.

Presentations should be accurate, clear and comprehensible to readers with a background in statistical applications. When necessary, detailed proofs, computer code, and other lengthy technical portions of a manuscript should be placed in an appendix so that they will not interfere with the primary focus of the paper. which is to be a discussion of the statistical methods and issues being addressed. Real data should almost always be used to illustrate the statistical applications being discussed. The source of the data must be fully documented. When it is not practical to include the whole data set in the paper, the paper should state how the complete data set can be obtained. Placement of the data sets on the JABES website is encouraged. Unless conditions of security of confidentiality intervene, availability of the data on which the paper is based is a requirement for publication.

2. General

Every journal must rely heavily on the cooperation of referees whose recommendations form the basis of editorial decisions. Please make your comments as constructive as possible.

3. Time

Please return your report to the associate editor within 4-6 weeks. Should you be unable to stay within this time limit you would oblige us greatly by notifying us as to when we may expect your report. If you are unable to review the manuscript, please return the material promptly to the associate editor. In that case, a suggestion of a potential reviewer, especially a younger person in the profession, will be appreciated.

4. Procedures

Please submit your report to the associate editor in the following three parts:

(a) For transmission to the author set out your comments, both general and detailed, under a heading giving full title, author and number of the paper. If mailing the report, prepare this in triplicate leaving the original without any identifying marks but signing the copies for editorial use. (One copy is for retention by the associate editor.) Please use paper that cannot be identified with your affiliation. this part should not contain your recommendation on acceptance or rejection. We also encourage reports by e-mail.

(b) In a covering letter add any remarks you wish to make to the associate editor (or editor) but not to the author.

(c) Fill in the check list and return it to the associate editor with your report. The check list is available on a separate link on the JABES web page. Please click on "Checklist for Referees" at the bottom of this page.

(d) you do not have to return the paper.

REVIEW TIMES: The statistical profession as a whole requires for too long to review papers. See the IMS Bulletin (1995, volume 24, #6, pages 607-608) for an interesting discussion, and a graph based on data derived by one of the new editors. Remarks on the review process were given in an enlightened discussion by Leon Jay Gleser in the American Statistician (1985, volume 4, pages 310-312).

The problem of review times can be ameliorated somewhat by the efforts of the editors (both past and present), for whom the issue has been and will be of foremost importance. However, the entire review process depends on the help of referees, without whom the journal could not function. We note for your use the following points:

1. It is not expected of referees in the laboratory sciences and even computational sciences to check a paper by redoing the authors' experiments. Instead, referees are asked to check that the results are interesting and important, that the results are plausible and that the methods used are described in a way that someone could, if interested, verify the results. We would like JABES referees to use the same approach.

2. In particular, we do not expect you to check the mathematical details of a paper on a line-by-line basis. This seems to us to be the major problem in the field with review times. Referees feel obligated to do such checking, but no one has the time to do so, and thus papers are often left on one's desk in hope that the problem will go away.

3. A better process is for referees to ask the essential questions:

- Is the problem of clear statistical importance?
- Is the application interesting and well laid-out?
- Are the methods or the application new and interesting?
- Have the authors faithfully referenced the available literature?
- Are the announced results plausible given your experience in the field and overview of the paper.
     Please note: we are not asking that you verify the details in the paper. It is the responsibility of
     authors to get their results right, and the responsibility of referees only to evaluate the essential plausibility
     of the end results.
- Have the authors described their methods in sufficient detail that one could, if necessary, reproduce them?
- Are there changes or additions that could improve the science of the paper?
- Are there changes or additions that could make the paper more accessible to readers? We are not asking you here to rewrite the paper, merely to point out which parts of the paper might be made better by the authors.

Here is a Checklist for Referees