Guidelines for Contributors to Statistical Modelling
1. All material submitted for publication is assumed to be exclusively for Statistical Modelling, and not to be currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All authors must assign copyright to Sage upon acceptance (by completing the copyright assignment form). Priority and time of publication are decided by the editors, who maintain the customary right to edit material accepted for publication if necessary.
2. Submission of manuscripts must be in electronic form only. Initial submission of the paper should be as a single, all-inclusive document in PDF format if at all possible (that is, including all figures and tables). LaTeX is the preferred package for document preparation, although Microsoft WORD is also acceptable. Files under five megabytes can be sent by email to an editor (ideally zipped and sent as an attachment). Larger files can be submitted by placing them on an FTP or HTTP site and directing an editor to them (again files can be zipped to compress them).
3. Manuscripts should be formatted for A4 or 8½ x 11" paper and double-spaced. Margins should be at least 25mm on all edges. Normal-sized fonts (12pt) should be used. Pages should be numbered consecutively. LaTeX manuscripts should use the article style and should not use any special macros.
4. When preparing manuscripts in Microsoft WORD:
• Use the minimum formatting.
• Roman, bold and italic type can be used, but use only one typeface and size.
• Capitals should be used only where they are to appear in the finished text.
• The text should be ranged left and unjustified, with hyphenation cancelled.
• Indents, underlining and tabs should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
• Headings and paragraphs should be separated by two returns.
• There should be only one space between words and only one space after any punctuation.
5. Authors should include their name and initials, their posts at the time they wrote the manuscript, their current appointments, and their address for correspondence with telephone/fax numbers and email addresses. For papers with several contributors, the order of authorship should be made clear and the ‘responsible author’ (to whom proofs and offprints will be sent) named.
6. Papers should normally be no more than 8000 words or 20–25 pages of A4 or 8½ x 11" paper in length. Any diagrams or tables should be counted as equivalent to around 200 words or half a page of text. One of the editors should be informed if these limits are likely to be exceeded. An abstract of up to 200 words should precede the text together with 5 or 6 keywords in alphabetical order to describe the content of the paper. Authors should take great care in preparing the abstract and not simply lift it from the main text. The abstract should describe the background and contribution of the manuscript and give a clear verbal description of the results and examples, and avoid citations whenever possible. Any acknowledgements will be printed at the end of the text.
7. Upon acceptance of the paper, authors should send the following files:
For LaTeX submissions:
• one LaTeX or ASCII file (without figures);
• one Postscript or PDF file of the full version of the paper;
• an ASCII file of any data used in the paper and any novel software routines (see below).
For Microsoft WORD submissions:
• one Microsoft WORD file of the complete paper with figures included at the end ;
• an ASCII file of any data used in the paper and any novel software routines (see below).
8. Style
General: Abbreviations should be spelled out when first used in the text. Full stops should be used in lower case abbreviations (e.g., i.e.) but not for capitals (SAS, ANOVA). Spelling is to follow the Oxford Dictionary.
Mathematical: All vectors and matrices should be shown in bold type. Avoid confusion between ambiguous characters and take care to ensure that subscripts and superscripts are clear. Numbers below 10 should be written out in the text unless used in conjunction with units (e.g. three apples, 4 kg). Full points (not commas) should be used for decimals. For numbers less than one, a nought should be inserted before the decimal point. Use spaces (not commas) within numbers (e.g. 10 000, 0.125 275). Equations should be numbered sequentially within each main section, e.g. (3.2) for the second equation in section 3, with labels on the right hand side of the page. This is easily done in LaTeX by inserting the following commands in the preamble
\usepackage{amsmath}
\renewcommand{\theequation}{\thesection.\arabic{equation}}
\numberwithin{equation}{section}
Headings and Subheadings: The use of more than three levels of heading should be avoided. Levels should be formatted as follows:
1 First level heading
1.2 Second level heading
1.2.1 Third level heading
9. Tables and illustrations: These should have self-explanatory legends and captions. After acceptance of a manuscript, the authors will be required to submit EPS (encapsulated Postscript) or TIFF versions of all figures.
10. Footnotes: Footnotes are strongly discouraged. Authors should make every effort to make such material part of the running text.
11. Data and Software: It is expected that any data used will be made available upon acceptance of the manuscript, either as an included table for small datasets or as ASCII files for larger datasets. These data will be made available on a linked website upon publication of the paper. If there are confidentiality problems, authors should contact an Editor to work out a solution, which could be the inclusion of an example based on a similar (but artificially simulated) dataset. Brief information on the software used for any analyses should be included in the paper. Any novel software used in the paper (language source code or macros/routines for standard packages) should also be made available, together with driver programs that allow the reader to reproduce the results given in the paper. For published papers this code will also be put on the linked website.
12. References: The Harvard style should be used for references, with citations in the text giving authors’ names and dates of publication, using Hinde (1999) for a direct reference and (Hinde, 1999) for an indirect reference. et al. should be used in citing references where there are more than two authors, so (Smith and Jones,2000), but (Smith et al., 2000) if there are three or more authors. The references are then listed in full at the end of the article in alphabetical order.
Journal article:
Cleveland, W.S. (1984) Graphs in scientific publications. The American Statistician, 38, 361–69.
Journal titles should be stated in full. List surnames and initials of up to and including four authors (with more than four authors only give the first four then et al.).
Book:
Ehrenberg, A.S.C. (1975) Data reduction: analyzing and interpreting statistical data. New York: John Wiley.
Chapter in book:
Gabriel, K.R. (1985) Multivariate graphics. In Kotz, S., Johnson, N.L. eds. Encyclopaedia of statistical sciences. New York: John Wiley, 66–79.
13. Permissions: It is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain written consent from the original publisher and author(s) to use any copyrighted material published previously elsewhere. Please forward all correspondence with the final version of your manuscript.
14. Addresses for Submission:
Submissions from North America should be sent to:
Brian Marx
Co-ordinating Editor, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal
Louisiana State University
USA
Email: bmarx@lsu.edu [unzipped files only]
Other submissions should be sent to:
Herwig Friedl
Editor, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal
Technical University Graz
AUSTRIA
Email: hfriedl@tugraz.at
or
Jeffrey S. Simonoff
Editor, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal
New York University
USA
Email: jsimonof@stern.nyu.edu
For a more detailed stylesheet, write to:
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
B 1/I 1Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area
Mathura Road
New Delhi 110 044
Tel: 40539222
Fax: 91-11-40539234
e-mail: editors@sagepub.in
