Editorial: Statistics and computing: Having an impact

We all have a sense of which are the premier research journals and which are secondary or tertiary. Long established journals such as the journals of the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and so on, have come to define the nature of the disciplines they advocate. They have a stature to match their longevity. It can be difficult for newer journals to be seen to make an impact. This is especially true for journals, like Statistics and Computing, which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. While those who work in the cross-disciplinary area certainly have a sense of the order of journals in these new areas, this assessment is subjective and often based on anecdote. One objective measure of a journal's impact, and hence of its stature, is the so-called 'impact factor' which the Institute for Scientific Information, or ISI (producers of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index), has been publishing since 1975 in its Journal Citation Report (JCR). From the Institute's web site (www.isinet.com): [The impact factor] is a measure of the frequency with which the " average article " in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The annual JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and