Michael L. Cohen, Statistics and Public Policy Editor
In 2013, the American Statistical Association began publishing the open-access online journal Statistics and Public Policy in conjunction with Taylor & Francis. The founding co-editors—Sally Morton, David Banks, Dan McCaffrey, and Sharon Lohr—established the goal of publishing papers that examined current public policy issues that require rigorous statistical analysis or insight to fully understand the policy question at hand. Members of the current editorial board hope to continue the progress made in the journal’s first two years. Toward that end, we encourage the submission of articles that address local, national, or international policy questions in which the emphasis is on the application, rather than the novelty of the methodology.
The opportunity exists for our profession to provide insight into many important public policy questions for which key aspects can only be understood through the use of a careful statistical analysis or argument. By doing so, not only do we shed new light on important issues of the day, but we also demonstrate the value of our discipline in addressing such issues.
Recent examples for which Statistics and Public Policy has provided new clarity are the sensitivity to model form that should limit the role value-added models play in the assessment of elementary- and secondary-school teachers, the identification of childhood cancer clusters in Florida through the use of spatial clustering, model uncertainty in environmental dose-response risk analysis, the use of various metrics in assessing the difference between two distributions to determine minority representation in jury pools, and the performance of and differences between major political polls in battleground states from 2004 through 2012.
Despite the opportunity our journal provides for the dissemination of such research, we have yet to fully achieve what was envisioned. Our submissions numbers are not yet at a sustainable level. To help build the submission momentum we need, we hope to increase awareness of this new journal throughout the statistics and affiliated communities. Please visit our journal webpage and spread the word.
Statistics and Public Policy is a new journal with an energetic editorial board that can provide helpful editorial assistance and expeditious decision making for authors. We will strive to continue identifying, refining, and publishing research papers that help clarify some of the most vital issues of public policy of the day and, by doing so, also help promote the use of statistics.
Statistics and Public Policy Editorial Board
Michael Cohen, National Academy of Sciences
David Banks, Duke University
Georgiy Bobashev, RTI International
Alicia Carriquiry, Iowa State University
Miguel de Carvalho, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Alan F. Karr, RTI International
Mary Beth Landrum, Harvard University Medical School
Michael D. Larsen, The George Washington University
Denise Lievesley, King’s College London
David Marker, Westat
Salil Mehta, Georgetown University
Jasjeet Sekhon, University of California at Berkeley
Nature and Science have essentially taken the editorial position that global warming is real and man-made and they do not accept papers that are against that position.
The US EPA has taken the position that air quality, PM2.5 and ozone, is causal of acute deaths. They will not make their data sets public.
The ASA has taken the position that any possible compromise on personal identity trumps making data sets public even where serious public health policy questions are at issue.
There are many hot button policy issues.
What is the Statistics and Public Policy Editorial Board doing to support authors that are taking contrary positions? Why should an author think this journal will be fair?