Do we need…yes we do (with some delay)!

Sometimes, if not that often, I forget about submitted papers to the point of thinking they are already accepted. This happened with the critical analysis of Murray Aitkin’s book Statistical Inference, already debated on the ‘Og, written with Andrew Gelman and Judith Rousseau, and resubmitted to Statistics and Risk Modeling in November…2011. As I had received a few months ago a response to our analysis from Murray, I was under the impression it was published or about to be published. Earlier this week I started looking for the reference in connection with the paper I was completing on the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox and could not find it. Checking emails on that topic I then discovered the latest one was from Novtember 2011 and the editor, when contacted, confirmed the paper was still under review! As it got accepted only a few hours later, my impression is that it had been misfiled and forgotten at some point, an impression reinforced by an earlier experience with the previous avatar of the journal, Statistics & Decisions. In the 1990’s George Casella and I had had a paper submitted to this journal for a while, which eventually got accepted. Then nothing happened for a year and more, until we contacted the editor who acknowledged the paper had been misfiled and forgotten! (This was before the electronic processing of papers, so it is quite plausible that the file corresponding to our accepted paper went under a drawer or into the wrong pile and that the editor was not keeping track of those accepted papers. After all, until Series B turned submission into an all-electronic experience, I was using a text file to keep track of daily submissions…) If you knew George, you can easily imagine his reaction when reading this reply… Anyway, all is well that ends well in that our review and Murray’s reply will appear in Statistics and Risk Modeling, hopefully in a reasonable delay.