predatory but not that smart…

An email I received earlier this week, quite typical of predatory journals seeking names for their board, but unable to distinguish comments from papers, statistics from mathematical physics, or to spot spelling mistakes:

Dear Christian P. Rober,

Greetings and good day.

I represent Editorial Office of Whioce Publishing Pte. Ltd. from Singapore. We have come across your recent article, “Comments on: Natural induction: An objective Bayesian approach” published in RACSAM – Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales. Serie A. Matematicas. We feel that the topic of this article is very interesting. Therefore, we are delighted to invite you to join the Editorial Board of our journal, entitled International Journal of Mathematical Physics We also hope that you can submit your future work in our journal. Please reply to this email if you are interested in joining the Editorial Board.

I look forward to hearing your positive response. Thank you for your kind consideration.

 

and here we go!

On March 1, I have started handling papers for Biometrika as deputy editor, along with Omiros Papaspiliopoulos. With on average one paper a day to handle this means a change in my schedule and presumably less blog posts about recent papers and arXivals if I want to keep my daily morning runs!

Biometrika

After ten years of outstanding dedication to Biometrika, Anthony Davison is retiring as Editor of Biometrika on 31 December. Ten years! Running a top journal like Biometrika is a massive service to the statistics community, especially when considering the painstaking stage of literally editing each paper towards the stylistic requirements of the journal. For which we definitely should all be quite grateful to Anthony. And to the new Editor, Paul Fearnhead, for taking over. I will actually join the editorial board as assistant editor, along with Omiros Papaspiliopoulos, meaning we will share together the task of screening and allocating submissions. A bit daunting given the volume of submissions is roughly similar to the one I was handling for Series B ten years ago. And given the PCI Comput Stat experiment starting soon!

bibTeX and homonymy

How comes BibTeX is unable to spot homonyms?! Namely, if I quote two of my 1996 papers in the same LaTeX document, they will appear as Robert (1996a) and Robert (1996b). However, if I quote two different authors (or groups of authors) with the same surname, Martin as in the above example, who both happened to write a paper in 2014, BibTeX returns Martin (2014) and Martin (2014) in the output, hence it fails to recognise they are different authors, which is just weird! At least for author-year styles. I looked on Stack Exchange TeX forum, but the solution I found did not work with the IMS and Springer styles.