Editorial

I was appointed Editor in Chief of Statistical Methods & Applications (SMAP) in July 2015 and I am about to step down after 4 years of service. The aim of this Editorial is first and foremost to thank all the people and scholars who contributed to the journal and inform our readers and members of the Italian Statistical about the status and the prospects of the journal.

To begin with, I am grateful to the Italian Statistical Society, the past President, Prof. Nicola Torelli, the incumbent President, Prof. Monica Pratesi and the Council, for their trust and continuing support throughout these years. I feel honoured to have succeeded in this role to Professors Maurizio Vichi, Francesco Battaglia and Andrea Cerioli, to whom I am scientifically indebted. It is under their direction that SMAP has gained international relevance and accreditation.

I also take this opportunity to thank the following persons, who served as Associate Editors during these 4 years.

Bruno Arpino	Dani Gamerman	Pier Francesco Perri
Ruggero Bellio	Leonardo Grilli	Arthur Pewsey
Rajendra Bhansali	Marc Hallin	Mariano Porcu
Stefanie Biedermann	Christian Hennig	Paolo Postiglione
Matilde Bini	Mia Hubert	Igor Pruenster
Marco Bonetti	Salvatore Ingrassia	Maria Giovanna Ranalli
Nicolas Chopin	Giovanna Jona Lasinio	Marco Riani
Dalit Contini	Siem Jan Koopman	Roberto Rocci
Gauri Datta	Alessandra Luati	Rosario Romera
Manfred Deistler	Stefano Mazzuco	Luca Tardella
Marco Di Marzio	Paul McNicholas	Gerhard Tutz
Fabrizio Durante	Giovanni Motta	Stefan Van Aelst
Abdelhameed El-Shaarawi	Anna Maria Paganoni	Cristiano Varin
Luis Angel García Escudero	Eleonora Patacchini	Laura Ventura
Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi	Francesco Pauli	Rosanna Verde
Alessio Farcomeni	Cira Perna	Jeroen Vermount

I was very fortunate to work with two extraordinary Co-Editors, Professors Ruggero Bellio and Carla Rampichini. I wish Carla all the success in the direction of this Journal. Ruggero has been an invaluable asset for the evaluation of the methodology papers, thanks to his far reaching expertise and vision.

Finally, I wish to thank the managing editor of the journal, Dr. Francesca Torti, for her continuous and skilled service to the Authors and the Editorial Board, as well as our contacts at Springer, among whom Dr. Martina Bihn, Bernhard Schüller, Tatiana Plotnikova, Preethi Subramanian and Pravin Selvakumar.

My main purpose has been that of continuing the work of the previous Editors in improving the scientific impact of SMAP in all areas of Statistics, including their applications. I think that SMAP is now a well established journal, providing a fair representation of a thriving scientific community, represented by the Italian Statistical Society, and its international connections.

While the number of published pages has not changed (Statistical Methods & Applications publishes four issues per year with around 180 pages per issue), the number of submission has increased over time (see Table 1) and times may soon be ripe for increasing either the number of issues or the number of pages per issue. The word cloud of article titles published in SMAP during the last 4 years (see Fig. 1) highlights the main topics which have been covered, which also reflect some of the areas of excellence of the Italian statistical community, such as robust inference, Bayesian nonparametrics, clustering and classification, environmental statistics and spatio-temporal processes, to mention a few.

Table 1 Metrics and impact of SMAP

Fig. 1

Word cloud of SMAP article titles

Although I am not particularly fond of journal metrics, I cannot exempt myself from being assessed in my editorial role also on their basis. The main ones concerning SMAP are reproduced in Table 1, starting from the first source, the InCities Journal Citation Reports (JRC) by Clarivate Analytics, available at https://jcr.clarivate.com. The table reports the total number of citations, which has been steadily increasing in the years 2015–2018 and the highly popular impact factor, which is in my opinion less reliable than other metrics, due to its large temporal variability. The 5-year impact factor is naturally more stable.

CiteScore, based on the citations recorded in Scopus over a 3-year period, has a positive trend so that at the end of the period SMAP is ranked as a ‘median’ journal.

Finally, according to SCImago Journal & Country Rank, which is based on Scopus, available at the link www.scimagojr.com, the total number of citations over the three previous years has been steadily growing and has reached 99 in 2018; a similar trend characterises the number of citations per document over the last 3 years, which has reached around 0.91 in 2018. As a result SCImago ranks SMAP in the second upper quartile of the journals distribution in the field Statistics and Probability.

Being there much room for improvement, I think that we can be optimistic about the future of SMAP. Once again, thank you to all the people, including the authors and the many anonymous reviewers, who devoted their time and effort contributing to the success of Statistical Methods & Applications.