Wei Pan

PubH 8403 Presentation

Manuscript Submission and Review: My Views and Stories as an Author

How to Choose A Journal

• Why to publish?

-- to disseminate your results

-- to advance your career• Factors

– Journal reputation, impact factor– Readerships– Review time, open access, publishers etc– A practical approach:

where are the references published?

Some Journals

• Example, but not complete, list; debatable– Top Stat methods/theory journals: JASA, JRSS-B, Biometrika, Ann

Statist

– Top Biostat or applied stat journals: Biometrics, JASA (Case Studies), JRSS-C (Applied Statistics), Ann Applied Statist, (Controlled) Clinical Trials, …

– More specialized Stat journals: JCGS, SADM, JBES, BA, …

– Top Machine Learning Journal: JMLR

– Bioinformatics and Stat Genetics journals: Nature Genetics, AJHG, Bioinformatics, Genetic Epidemiology, …

Personal stories

• My first (and only one) in Comm Statist: Pan and Chappell (1998); EMS (EM + Smoothing) algorithm ~ a penalized/regularized method;

• My first (and only one ) in Controlled Clinical Trials: Pan (2001); sample size calculations for GEE; the editor at the time?

• My first in Biometrika: Pan (2001); a small-sample size adjustment in GEE; needed a theory.

• My QIC paper in Biometrics: Pan (2001); model selection in GEE; my most highly cited paper; implemented in SAS Genmod and other packages.

More stories

• My first in Bioinformatics: Pan (2002), stat analysis of microarray data; barely got published; now my 2nd most highly cited.

• My first in Genetic Epi: Pan (2009);

• testing H0: b1=b2=…=bk in a GLM:

• g(u)=b0+X1*b1+X2*b2+…+Xk*bk; X1,…, Xk are correlated;

• use the Wald (or Score or LR) test?

• Surprises: in forming a test stat, 1) incorrect assuming b1=b2=…=bk; 2) incorrectly ignoring the correlations among the estimates of b’s;

Finally

• Of course I have bad ones: rejected after 1 or 2 revisions (after 2 or 3 years); some comments are not nice; …

• Most important: don’t give up! Do what you are interested in.

• I look forward to hearing your own stories, hopefully successful ones…