Hello everybody good afternoon and welcome to this members week event. I would just like to start by introducing myself for anybody that doesn’t know. My name is Susan Ale and I am the membership development manager here at RSS. I’m also going to be chairing all of the sessions for this week so before we begin on the station I just want to run through some housekeeping rules. So please could you make sure that your cameras are switched off and that your microphones are on mute. We are very privileged to have Nathan presenting with us today and Brian Taran and the way that it’s going to work with this session is we’ll hear first from Brian and he’ll have his presentation and then we’ll have guys presentation and at the end we will reconvene and I’ll be able to take any questions that you may have. If you do have a question please type this in the comments box or raise your hands but please try to refrain from asking those questions during the presentations and just wait until till the end for the question and answer session. Okay so that’s all from me for now I’d just like to hand over to my colleague Brian, Taran. Thanks Susan do you want cameras off for presenters as well or cameras on any preference I mean I’m not looking my best today but could you please put your camera on. Thank you. Okay hi everyone let me just get my presentation slide up. So I’m the editor of significance magazine. Significance is obviously a benefit that you get as a member of the royal statistical society and also if you’re a member of the American statistical association as well I’ve been editor of the magazine since 2014 and this presentation the slides were actually put together primarily by Mario Cortina who is the chair of our editorial board. Mario put them together for a talk he did at UCL but I’ve edited them down. For today’s talk I will apologize in advance if you hear any barking dogs or children running around in the background. I’m in the role of lone parent today when my wife’s at work so anyway, hopefully if you want if you’ve been a member of the rss for a while. You will hopefully already receive a copy of significance and hopefully you’ve read it and enjoyed it. If you’re a new member, I hope you enjoy it when you receive your first copy. We want Significance to be something not only that you get as a member, that you read and enjoy, but also something that you feel like you can contribute to. Now I should say you do not have to be a member of the rss in order to write for Significance. We do require you to be a member of the rss if you wanted to sit on the editorial board. For example we have 10 members of the rss 10 members of the asa who sit on the editorial board and their job is to work with me to construct the content for the magazine and to set the direction. The editorial direction of the magazine and their primary role is to review articles from a statistical perspective because I’m not a statistician I’m a journalist. My background is local newspapers and magazines and so I’m there to work with authors, to help construct a story around the article, around the analysis. The editorial board helps get the analysis into the right shape so it’s a very brief history of significance. So, it’s a bi-monthly magazine for with the stated goal being interesting to anybody who has some interest in statistics and analysis and interpretation of data. We don’t want the magazine to be something that only people with high level of experience or qualification in statistics can read and enjoy. We want it to be something that you know if you have a passion for data that you can pick it up and you can get something out of it. You might not know my significance might not teach you how to be a statistician but our goal really I think is to to help you understand how statisticians think about problems and how they approach the world and the decisions that need to be made within it. So our aim is to communicate and demonstrate in an entertaining thought-provoking and non-technical way to practical use of statistics in all walks of life. So that’s from business, science, social policy, politics, whatever it might be and I guess you know we really want to achieve good outreach for statistics. We want to reach those people who might be thinking about a career in statistics, might be thinking about studying statistics or working with data in some way and we want to bring those ideas to a broader audience as possible. So that includes our 26,000 subscribers who are made up of the rss and the asa membership base primarily, but we know we’re also read by members of the media who look to the magazine to see what’s being discussed in the statistics community and that sometimes goes on to shape articles that they might write for their even more broader audience, their more mainstream audience. The important thing to know about significance is that it is it’s a magazine, it’s not a peer-reviewed journal mean. We’re often confused with a peer-reviewed journal mean so people will send us papers. Journal mean they’re quite technical, quite detailed and structured in the way that you would expect of a journal mean paper and those are generally rejected straight away as not being right for significance but we will always speak to the author and get back to them and try to find a way where we could perhaps turn the paper into a magazine article.
The magazine was established in 2004. It was originally quarterly and then it became bi-monthly from 2011 onwards so, as a member of the rss you’ll get six issues of the magazine a year. We also have all content that is published in print appears on the wiley online library which you can access through your membership and there’s also a com website significancemagazine.com which publishes web exclusive content for people to read and also contribute to. So as I’ve said, articles are non-technical and they’re meant to be accessible and appealing as well as promoting the discipline of statistics and covering topics that are of interest to statisticians in their daily lives.
We also want to feature things like reflection on statistics in the news, case studies or reviews of new areas of statistics or new methods that are being developed but with a focus on showing how those methods can be applied to real, relatable problems that people might experience day-to-day. So often the first question that is asked about significance is what should I write about and genuinely it can be on any subjects. So in the slide we’ve listed some recent examples, things about statistical graphics, plastic pollution, world cup, James Joyce’s novels is something that Mario’s written for us before and is particularly fond of. We featured interviews with statisticians in sort of unusual job, people working for things like the Miami dolphins, American football team, and this year we’ve done things like special issue on Florence Nightingale and the impact that her work has had and trying to understand how her work fit in with the statistical work that was being done at that time. The real important thing for us is to get the style right so I’ll repeat that point though you know we’re not a journal mean and journal mean that articles should be written in a journal mean magazine style. People often ask what does that mean. How do I do that? I’m not sure I’ve not written in that style before and but I always say to them I don’t think there’s a particular secret to it. We all generally speaking enjoy reading newspapers or general interest magazines. When we read those publications we can recognize a good article, when we see one we can recognize something that really captures our attention and draws us in and helps us to understand something that we might not be familiar with. So that’s the goal- to get to what Tim Harford who people will know through things like uh bbc radio 4’s more or less. I interviewed him for the October issue of significance and his advice was good advice really which was- if you want to learn how to write in this way you should read people who are good storytellers or listen to good storytelling and then ask yourself why is this good story? And then you have a think about that and then try to apply that to the writing that you do and it takes practice, it takes work. I’ve been a journal mean for I’ve got a couple of 15 years now and you know I still read things that people write and think- wow I wish I could do that or little tricks that you might pick up and try and adopt into your own writing. So it’s a constant process of of learning and refining but just being attuned to that I think helps. But then there’s some other general uh ideas that you should you should keep in mind you know we don’t want to see too much use of jargon in significance articles so ideas and concepts that you know you could explain quite simply to another statistician with with the uh you know professional jargon that they need to be explored and explained and actually conveyed to readers uh one of our editorial board members robert matthews actually likes to say you should it’s not a blanket rule don’t use jargon actually sometimes dropping in bits of jargon and explaining that really helps readers to feel like they’re being uh brought into a kind of a hidden world you know a kind of an area of research or uh area of study that they weren’t familiar with before and actually using some of that uh jargon and teaching them what it means is actually quite a good way of engaging them so it has to be used sparingly and sensibly uh the other the other thing to think about is always that is the structure of of the article there’s a there’s always good stories always have sort of a nice circularity to them uh you know where you start with a uh you know a question uh uh an anecdote or something that you know engages the reader and makes them relate to the topic in question and that you circle back to that at the end you know you give give people give people an opportunity through the reading of the article and the conclusion of the article to to reflect on how far they’ve come and how how much they’ve learned through reading uh so you should never forget that you were telling a story it’s you know we’re not where we’re different from a journal mean is that you’re not just presenting your work and you’re not just setting it out in a series of steps like you would in a journal mean paper um so you know the the hook is really important you know finding something that is relatable a human element a character a mystery some drama whatever it might be again following up on tim harford’s advice you know you read people who do this sort of stuff well i think there’s some amazing uh non-fiction writing out there one of my favorite authors or one of my favorite books certainly is a book called command and control by eric schlosser who’s a writer for the atlantic magazine in the us or was uh not sure if he’s still there but he wrote a book about nuclear weapon safety systems and i would never thought that i would have a particular interest in nuclear weapon safety systems but uh the way the story was told you know wrapping it around this human drama of the 1980 damascus titan missile explosion you know it was made made quite uh a deep and technical exploration of this subject it made it absolutely riveting so i would recommend that book as a good place to start um and you know in all good stories you know you don’t you don’t lose focus of what it is that you’re writing about uh you you make sure that you constantly while you’re writing you’re asking yourself is this important is this essential for the reader to know and you you focus only on the essentials to make sure that you bring the reader along with you especially if it’s a subject they might be unfamiliar with or didn’t think they have particular interest in before so having a strong through line a strong thread is really is really key some more technical uh details about writing for the magazine i guess a lot of this is contained in our notes for contributors you know guidance document that we have i can uh share the link if you’re interested in it uh you know we we don’t want we want figures and tables and things that are necessary to illustrate the the article and the story that’s being told but we you know we don’t use too many of them we want to make sure that the magazine when you pick it up and read it that it it it feels you know digestible it feels uh it doesn’t feel impenetrable so we like to keep these things to a minimum make sure the page is designed well so they encourage people to sit back and read similar to jargon we ask that people avoid mathematics and equations unless absolutely essential so mario gives an example here about you know obviously your article could be about an equation i think the important thing here like jargon is that if you’re going to use these these things that they’re not just presented and then it’s not just assume that the reader knows what you’re talking about you have to spend some time explaining uh you know how the equation is put together and what it means and what it does it’s to give the reader a general sense even if they might not necessarily understand in detail uh or how to apply it how to apply it themselves um obviously you know we have different uh rules and requirements on sort of data sources and references that you could you can use i mean any data sources and references that you do use we obviously want to see the references in there especially data sources you know we want people to be able to pick up the articles and go away and you know maybe explore the data themselves but you can use things like you know wikipedia entries website data collections that sort of thing and obviously illustration is is important uh you don’t have to provide your own photos and artwork and things like that but if you’ve got something in mind always share it with us because you know a a part of a a great magazine article yeah is the the visual element of it and so you know text and images should work together as a as one to sort of engage the reader and draw them in um so uh i think that one thing to to consider if you’re if you’re thinking of writing for significance and you don’t know where to sort that draw that line of uh accessibility uh that we require is to actually ask around family or friends people who aren’t statisticians to to you know to review what you’ve written to see if there’s anything in there that that they have questions over or that they’re confused on and if you can then answer those questions in a second draft i i think that you know obviously when the article is submitted to our editorial board it’s it’s likely that those same questions aren’t going to come up certainly likely that i’m not going to ask those same questions uh because as i say you know my part of my job is that is to try and to try and be that general reader the person who doesn’t have an in-depth knowledge of of statistics and to you know to try and shape the article in such a way as that it is uh is still relevant and engaging for the non-expert reader a bit like you know a journal mean review process uh you know it’s it’s important that once the editorial board reviews an article and those comments go back to you uh you make sure you address all the comments made by the reviewers even if it is to sort of disagree with the suggestion that’s been made or you know say something like if you feel that it’s going to take the article in a different direction to that which you intended that’s fine but i know for working with the editorial board now for a number of years that uh they put a lot of time and effort and care into the work they do for the magazine and it’s nice for them to know that you’ve sort of read and engaged with the comments and considered them even if you know not all of them can be taken on board so you know speaking of the editorial editorial board review process we uh we have two members uh you know usually one or two members of the editorial board who look over each article it’s not peer review although you know technically the articles are reviewed by your peers um but i i think that the term that the editorial board often uses is a statistical sanity check basically or a statistical health check just to make sure that uh you know questions that a statistician would ask can be answered in the actual article that’s that’s published um as mario says it’s you know it’s a process similar to what you go through in a journal mean though the reviewers do understand that you know it’s not peer review and so the sort of questions you ask will be different in that regard uh i can’t you know the articles will be will be rejected by the editorial board if they if they think that they’re wrong or too technical or or that there’s not really an engaging story there but uh often you know it takes a few revisions for the story to come out so that’s not necessarily we don’t necessarily reject all articles out of hand if the story’s not quite right at the point of submission the only thing that would really get it rejected or i guess what a journal mean would call a desk reject is if it’s you know if it comes to me and it is just a journal mean paper with you know lines and lines of mathematics and i just don’t really see how how it could be applied to to this significance format so again that’s the point there too much technical detail mathematics uh a lack of story and story structure lack of wider relevance uh so as mario says you know some of the more theoretical areas of statistics are not really appropriate for significance because it’s going to be hard to try and relate those uh to um examples that you know general readers will will be able to understand what it is that you’re you’re trying to get across uh so you know if you are interested in writing for significance you can obviously pick up any issue with a magazine and see examples of the kind of articles that we’re interested in you know we’ve highlighted a few in this presentation of articles that we think are really stand out and ones that are worth reading many of them are actually part of our young young writers competition or it’s now the early career writing competition so this one by jonathan alback is about whether new york city really has as many rats as people and he sort of talks about how he’s sort of used a sort of variant of capture recapture uh to try and work this out um this article you know this is probably more more interested or more interesting to the statistics profession than a general reader but we did a history piece about the the development and evolution of the software r or the the you know the programming language are and it was it’s become our most popular article i think partly because the author did a great job of promoting it to the our community and getting it shared on on twitter and other social media platforms so it’s been been very engaging but we are very interested in the history of statistics and telling the story of of statistics as well as you know showcasing applications of statistics this article here by letitia smith is another example from our writing competition which was sort of a bit of analytics text analytics scrape from online recipe sites to try and uh you know group together recipes with similar ingredients to help streamline uh shopping and meal plans for a week and again this is another article actually did it did emerge from our uh writing competition but uh it needed a bit more work so you know it was developed over a few months and this was again text analytics on uh albums of the year over several decades to sort of you know figure out whether um albums of the year have become more positive or more negative in their lyrical content so i’ll close quickly with some with some recommendations uh so obviously read the magazine i hope you do and i hope you enjoy it er we’re always uh keen to hear from readers if there are things you like and you’d like to see more of do let us know if there are things that you like that you’d like to write yourself then definitely get in touch um author guidelines i mentioned earlier there are significancemagazine.com forward slash contribute but i can email them directly to you as well if you’d prefer and you know really just if you’ve got an idea and you want to discuss it with us you know come to us to to to ask we’re always happy uh you don’t have to come to us with a fully formed idea can just be a an outline or you know i’ve you know i’ve seen this thing in uh in the news and i’d like to discuss it from a statistical angle then do get in touch happy to discuss with you and figure out how we can make it work for for significance um but i think you know the important thing to keep in mind is you know we want to tell engaging stories we want to get people interested and excited and enthusiastic about statistics so if it’s something that really fires you up that’s something that you really want passionate about and want to share then then there’s probably going to be an engaging story there for us and we’d love to hear from you and discuss it further Brian thank you so much for that presentation it’s very insightful and it’s also very useful for people to see what it is that you’re looking for um with their writing so uh Brian if you could just if you could stay with us um for guys presentation and then we’re going to have the um the questions at the end of the presentation so i’ll ask both guy and Brian and just a reminder if you do want to ask a question please do type up in the text box okay i’m now going to hand over to our guest speaker guy nathan thank you hi um can you hear me okay yeah all right great can you see the screen yeah i can see it now can i make this full screen this is a challenge there we go all right good so um this uh segment is going to be about um a different kinds of publications than Brian was talking about uh and a set of meetings that the rss holds called discussion meetings um i’m currently chair of the research section of the raw statistical society and i’ll explain what that is a little bit later on my day job is at imperial college in london um so here’s a kind of overview of what i’m going to be talking about uh one of the things that the royal statistical society is and of course it’s many different things is it’s a learning society it’s been that for a very long time and so one of the things that we do is produce academic output of various kinds so this little presentation talks about the journal means these are the academic journal means slash scientific journal means of the raw statistical society and there are currently three a b and c and collectively they’re known as journal mean of the royal statistical society and then series a series b or series uh yeah a b or c and there used to be a d but we no longer have a d um and i’m also going to be talking about uh discussion meetings which if you like are linked to um the journal means loosely but is a kind of special format all of its own um and as the name suggests it’s about um meetings um where papers are are discussed and uh the research section i’ll also explain about that but let me talk about the journal means first of all um so again this is the Brian said significance doesn’t really publish academic uh papers and academic articles the journal mean of the rss does so and how does it do that well every journal mean has a set of editors so for example series a currently has two editors uh and then the editors are assisted by uh 26 associate editors and i’ll explain the process and what they do in a second series b uh that tends to have a lot more submissions and at the moment it has two but i think after christmas that’s going to have three main editors and that has 38 associate editors siri c that currently has two editors and 20 associate editors and what is it about what do these journal means do well they essentially take submissions people write articles academic articles for them and then there’s a process by which people submit those articles to the journal means for consideration for publication but there’s an extensive review process that you have to go through um from submission to publication anyone can submit an article and exactly the same way as Brian described it’s probably best to read and scan some articles in the journal mean that you wish to submit to that doesn’t just go for raw statistical society journal means but of course any journal mean that you were intending to submit to so read some articles scan some articles get an idea of what kinds of things they’re writing at the flavor the structure of the articles and then you’ll have a good idea of what you’re aiming at before you write your article in addition there’s a huge amount of information about each journal mean on the website each journal mean has a dedicated set of web pages which gives clear instructions on how to submit and the expectations that are placed on authors who submit to the journal mean and once you actually get to the submission point there’s that link there which you can use to submit your article and that’s for all series the journal means themselves in a sense they’re a collaboration between the royal statistical society and the wily publishing company rss still does a great deal of the work um essentially runs the whole reviewing process although a lot of the reviewers the editors are employees of academic institutions or government research institutions why they do more of the production side they produce the paper versions for example they run the websites that actually contain all of the papers and produce all the pds for example uh paper copies are still produced but of course one wonders how long that’s going to continue in the future uh the process will prepare an article according to the submission instruction sounds simple doesn’t it but of course as we know that’s a very tough long and arduous job in its in itself once you’ve done that uh submit it using the website and i should also say just as Brian says don’t just you know write an article in a couple of days and submit it to a journal mean you know once you’ve written it leave it for a couple of weeks maybe come back and look at it send it to other people that you know who you trust and to get their views on it so it should be a reasonably uh revised state already even before it goes into submission for the journal mean once you’re ready submit it using the website the article gets rooted to the editors and they basically do a quick review over whether they think the article has a good general fit to the journal mean whether it’s appropriate again this is kind of what Brian said that’s what the editor does you know is this can i see this article kind of in my journal mean or in my magazine it’s the right style um but you know most of the um most of the articles that go into the journal means are quite specialized academic papers and so the editor and the editors are all wonderful and they’ve got a great general knowledge of statistics they’re clearly not necessarily specialists in the area that you want to submit to so the editors if they like it think it could be suitable they send it to one of the associate editors for a more detailed reading and an assessment and again the editor might not be a specialist right in the field but they might be closer to the subject of the paper and at that stage um it could then go out to review as we’ll describe in a second or it could go back to the editors they actually know this isn’t quite right for us um if it isn’t rejected and the associate editor likes it is then usually sent to specialist referees those that are really close to the area of work in the field usually it’s around two referees but it could on occasion be more than that all of these people are not only asking you know is this kind of like a new piece of statistics or a new piece of mathematics or something there are other questions that need to be answered as well is it interesting will it be interesting to the readership is it new is it important is it useful um it’s difficult to actually put an absolute judgment on all of these things it’s the balance of all of it which really decides on whether the paper goes further through the review process i think all journal means accept review papers if they’re comprehensive and authoritative reviews of an area so it’s not just about new research you can come up with an interesting synthesis of a particular area that i think the journal means also will consider those as well but it’s also worth checking sometimes if you’ve got a new idea for a new style of paper is checking with maybe with the editor for a quick view every paper gets accepted but before you get too excited i mean somewhere not necessarily in the society’s journal mean or any other journal mean you may choose but the old saying goes that ultimately all papers will get accepted somewhere although you know i’m not saying all the quality of the journal mean which you’ll get accepted um what decisions may you get back from the editorial process um well my informal take is the the decisions that you can get back from the editor are the the paper is just accepted without any changes to be made and that almost never happens first time so don’t expect that um accepted subject to minor revision well that doesn’t happen very much either much more likely is something like revise and resubmit even if they quite like it they’re about to be things that need to be changed or questions to be answered clarifications need to be made so it’s your job then to take that article and if you want to uh substantially revise it um and usually you get a list of comments from reviewers that you have to address and as Brian says they don’t all have to be done but you better have a good reason why something doesn’t need to be done otherwise you need to follow the instructions of the reviewers um but in any case that decision probably means that the journal mean is interested major revision well that’s where you probably need to do a fundamental rewrite uh for example extensive uh computations need to be done or redone uh maybe the basis of the paper question some extreme clarifications uh even if you do this it’s usually no guarantee that the journal mean will accept it and in fact you might be better off going to a different journal mean maybe the fit will be better somewhere else or you didn’t like what the reviewer said for example um a common occurrence is your paper might just be rejected and this could be for a number of reasons for example it could come back quickly saying it’s not a good fit for the journal mean or it could have got to reviewers and the reviewers have found some technical flaw or there’s something that doesn’t fit in with the common understanding in science or something like that um but just because your paper is rejected it’s really important to realize that this does not mean that you’re a bad person or it that the paper was bad um it can be rejected for a whole number of reasons and you know the one one reason could be for example um you didn’t quite judge um the remit of the journal mean correctly um and you know it may be a great paper but it’s not quite right for that journal mean so again a bit like significance was saying earlier what are the three journal means let me just give you a flavor of what they are so series a of the journal mean it’s a tagline is statistics in society and that’s the actual remit from the webpage essentially it’s about papers that demonstrate how statistical thinking design and analysis play vital role in all walks of life and benefit society in general there’s no restriction on subject matter and there’s a whole list of areas that they would accept papers on it’s about how statistics can benefit society i think that’s a good description of stats in society series b statistical methodology well that’s got a very long remit essentially theoretical work methodological work they like real examples uh it’s got to be very innovative insightful and preferably um have a substantial impact on the way data are collected and analyzed now some papers that are considered by series b some of the methodological theoretical papers are read before the society at its ordinary meetings so this i should say this bit in italics at the end is part of the journal mean description and i will describe this in a bit more detail when i talk about discussion meetings which is the new name for ordinary meetings and i’ll discuss this a little bit later so don’t worry about this uh italicized paragraph here um and i need to go back and ask the journal mean maybe to consider the wording of that part of the journal mean uh remit uh series c that’s about applied statistics um and that the name is on the tin it’s basically how statistics can be used in all kinds of statistical applications and again they cover a number of different fields essentially as long as it’s applying statistics and that’s that’s the kind of area that they cover um sometimes a series might run a themed issue so for example series a is currently running a call for a theme on big data meets survey science and people who are interested in that area follow the papers that topic and then assuming that they get enough papers of enough quality and they will publish a whole issue on that particular topic and then of course people who are interested in that area will pick up on that issue and and look at that one of the things wiley does is uh it forms what’s called virtual issues so they might get a collection of papers together from different series in fact but that are all on a current theme so there might be a data science theme when they take um papers from different series and put them all on one web page and that’s called a virtual issue and you can see some of those on the wiley webpage what about discussion meetings um again there’s a there’s a lot of description on the rss website that you can uh you can go and read about discussion papers and essentially and again this is from the website discussion meetings well they’re actually events not articles but what happens at discussion meetings is articles or sometimes called papers for reading that will be appearing in the journal mean of the rss they’re presented and discussed um so the authors will present the papers um and recently we’ve been holding these on teams um so people can still see those in in the covet era and then after they’re presented um they’re discussed first of all by a proposer and a second and then for a general discussion um from from people from the floor and then what happens is the paper the discussion and the author’s replies are then published in the relevant journal mean series now these uh discussion meetings have had various names over the years sometimes you’ll see them as ordinary meetings as is still in the remit of series b and historically they called that because they were the ordinary meetings of business for the society so for example they’re not general meetings or annual general meetings they were just ordinary meetings and another name that’s used for them is red papers because the paper is read out for people to listen to and they’re generally thought to be prestigious and the societies flag one of the society’s flagship events and they’ve been around uh for a long time possibly even for centuries so what’s the discussion meeting process well use the same submission website but there’s a place to indicate that you think the paper should be intended as a discussion meeting paper it then gets rooted to a discussion meetings committee i think the chair shirley is with us today they screen it those that are very theoretical or strictly methodological on the theoretical side they get rooted to the research section which i’m chair for screening and both committees they contain people who understand what makes a good discussion meeting and after screening a paper could be rejected quite quickly or then sent to referees for further evaluation as before as well as the usual criteria for journal means there is additional criteria for a discussion meeting will many people be interested you know for example is it hot topic is it even more important than a normal paper they’re the kinds of things that will convince the discussion meetings committee or the research section um about whether a paper will be a good fit to their programs okay that’s all i have to say at the moment on the process just to give you an overview of what’s going on so thank you very much for uh listening and i think i’ve managed to unshare my screen now is that correct yeah that’s right thank you so much guy that was a very interesting talk um so uh Brian as well you’re still with us here i am yeah okay um so i actually found that really interesting in terms of you actually have quite a lot in common in with what you need to do um so even though you are um you’re coming up from different levels of knowledge on statistics you still have that need to create quality work Brian i just wanted to ask you you said that um you were that with the significance it’s more important for you to get the story across more than say the hardcore facts so if you are presented with um a piece of writing that’s very kind of fact heavy and doesn’t have a lot of what what you’d see as a lot of story in it then how do you get that out of the writer and what is it that you’re looking for for in order to take it from just cold facts to a story i think it’s about it’s about trying to i always like to you think about it when you sit down uh remember when we used to sit down together in a pub or in a restaurant and you’d want to talk to people about an idea or something or a story that you’ve heard or whatever it is you know most people are really good at sort of finding a way of putting that across so that it focuses on them you know you get across the most important parts immediately then if you if the person that you’re who’s listening to you is interested they might ask follow-up questions and you you discuss further and then you might you know have a conversation around that it’s really it’s really about trying to replicate that in print so it’s not necessarily getting rid of the the the um all the detail or you know it’s it and it’s and it’s certainly not about um prioritizing uh opinion over facts or anything like that it’s more just about finding a way of of conveying it or conveying the information in in such a way as that it leads people to want to listen to or want to read to want to to follow along with it and not and not put up barriers to their understanding okay and um guys similarly you spoke about how a lot of the um the submissions will not be accepted uh first time round i think you said that it almost never happens and i just wondered if there if there were any kind of um common reasons for for why they’re not accepted the first time um yeah i mean there’s a whole host of um different reasons i guess i guess a lot of the time a quick reject happens because of lack of fit to the to the journal mean so for example something could be just mathematics and not really have any statistical content and that’s not really for a statistical series of journal means to publish or it could be simply that it’s not written very well um you know maybe the language isn’t isn’t very good it’s got grammatical mistakes i mean that still still happens um but i guess they’re the they’re the main reasons i mean often if there’s a big technical flaw um because the editors and the aes are i mean they’re they’re okay with the general area they might not be up to the minute in the very very very very narrow specific area and that might only be spotted by a very technical referee close to the area and that might take a while before that’s discovered because some of these papers are immensely intricate and sometimes long so it takes a lot of work um to get a paper into the journal mean just because it has to have an extensive review sometimes okay and guy you spoke about the the writing having to be the right fit for the publication so how do they ensure that they are keeping to the right fit is it in terms of the um the style that they’re they’re writing in or is it the subject matter what do they do to ensure that they are on track yeah yeah it’s a bit of both really and it’s i you know i echo exactly Brian’s words i mean the best thing to do is see what’s already written in a journal mean um and you know really think well do you think i can write something a bit like that maybe with my my subject area so to get fit right it’s it’s certainly doing that it’s reading the remit quite closely um you know if you’ve got a paper on an application of a particular statistical method a particular area or then you know apply statistics remit should be shouting out to you that that’s a that’s a possible place um yeah okay thank you and i’m just going to take some of the um questions that we’ve had during the presentation so um stephen smith has asked are ml slash ai articles of interest um if that’s directed to significance then yes certainly um i think we are as an editorial board quite keen that we uh increase coverage of what might be broadly considered sort of data science topics obviously there’s a you know ongoing discussion about how you know data science versus statistics and how much statistics is part of data science or vice versa but yeah you know we know we know that a lot of statisticians are working in these areas there’s a lot of really interesting work being done and we would like to reflect that in in the magazine definitely okay and i saw someone had the the handle was that shirley um yeah yeah i did actually just just um and guy i mean you mentioned it that um the discussion papers can be published in any of the journal means but just to emphasize that that um if the discussion meeting is something that’s appropriate for one of the other journal means then it gets published in there so it could be in series a or in series b or in series c most of them are in series b it’s true to say i don’t know unless this guy’s got any comment on that well yeah i was just going to add to that i mean i i think that’s that’s how it is and i i i completely agree with that i think my feeling is that excuse me the rss would be keen on more you know discussion papers that ended up in series a and see there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be um you know more more in there can i just make a a a contribution from experience as to papers getting rejected this is just as a as a person who’s trying to get things published what i’ve usually found is that um papers are rejected because of uh my lack of depth or completeness you know like um guy says it’s good to get it sounded out by your peers before you you submit it for publication and see what their comments are because quite often you might feel that you’ve looked at um an issue from all sides but but there are bits that you’ve forgotten and uh that you’ve missed so it is very important to uh if you can to get someone else to have a look at it first it’s very useful okay thank you shelley um and i actually wanted to ask about the series guy are there any particular series that you think are um kind of it better for people to to start off with or um do you if you if somebody was looking to just have their work published is there anything in particular that you would guide them towards whether it’s series a or b or um yeah i’m not sure i’d answer it like that because it’s more about what kind of work you’re writing about so if it’s theoretical and serious b is probably most likely um but on the other hand if people have done some work which is really important for some aspect of society i don’t know for example in education or medicine or something even if there’s some theoretical content it could well go into series a for someone starting off um i i think actually in the whole of scientific literature and academic literature for most kind of referee journal means i don’t think there is like a starter journal mean and often you i mean you’re right in some ways because in many other spheres there are kind of special routes for early career researchers for example for grants for example but for journal means i don’t think that’s the case i mean one one possible exception to that might be um journal means now you know more open access ones where you don’t necessarily have to have an important result but just a result for example that’s competently done and then it’s possible that that might be easier to get published in but those were also fairly happy to have fairly hefty fees um for publication as well um yeah okay thank you and um Brian a kind of similar question for you so um you must have people that are starting out that don’t have the same level of journal meanism background that you have and looking to get published so how uh or what advice can you give for them if they’re looking to get their work published in significance but they haven’t had a lot of experience before well well i think just to just to contact us and and uh you know to discuss an idea we will we will work with the author to sort of try and refine what’s presented to try to try and get it to that being suitable for significance um hopefully next year as well one thing we’re looking to do with the significancemagazine.com website is uh build a bank of regular contributors who essentially sort of create a various different blogs that people can contribute to um so again that might be an interesting way for someone who’s just starting out who wants to experiment with more general interest writing if they if they want to put themselves forward for that to drop me an email because again you know you can keep practicing and keep revising these things over time okay and that actually brings me to the next question which is from stephen smith so um he asks for significance are there topics or areas that are not currently being covered that you would actually like more of uh yes can i come back to you on that because i’ve the doorbell’s just gone and the dog’s blocking it this is the magical teams um so so guy while uh Brian is away and do let us know if you have any canine emergencies in the background michael k9 is out of the house at the moment there’s a question by richard saldana um i think i’m not sure if that’s directed to me or to Brian richard is a-i-m-l to Brian.
It was something he said um rather casually that uh aiml is is basically data science and uh i’d liven things up and uh ask this question yeah thanks for that yeah well you did it yourself well i mean like i mean wikipedia tells me that machine learning is part of data science so uh i don’t know i don’t know i mean i don’t get my information from wikipedia or at least i try and avoid it yeah well anyway i don’t i mean we we have covered arts articles we have published articles around artificial intelligence and statistical methods that might be used as part of that uh and so yeah there is an interest there and there’s an overlap there i’m not sure uh you know that i can say for certain that ai is part of statistics or statistics as part of ai or whatever but it’s it’s an area of interest and i know there’s a lot of sort of commonalities of people working in in the spaces so yeah yeah i mean it’s a very tongue-in-cheek sort of uh yeah i’m i’m working in sort of machine learning but i’m a statistician um exactly that’s the sort of thing we’re interested in people you know people with stats training with stats uh background who are you know are in these films you can write about it yeah do do get in touch we’re definitely interested in those sorts of ideas thank you thank you richard for that um it looks like we may have ignited a little um conflict there so i think it’s easily solved um by saying that actually um everything is data science absolutely everything because um you know we deal with data in all different kinds of ways so then then ai and ml is definitely included because not everyone agrees with that but it’s a good it’s a good escape route for that i shall cite you next time guy rather than wikipedia we’ve all you had to use wikipedia at one point or another don’t quote me on that so um so actually adam just just said it sounds like a good significance article in itself right the question of data science and statistics uh so steve this is just in from um from from stephen he says for significance are there topics or oh oh i think we we’ve got that one if there’s topics that you that aren’t i think Brian’s dog interrupted the question answer or something yes yeah denzel uh he always wants to get involved whenever we have presentations he’s uh very chatty uh yes uh there are uh we have i although we have a web page where we list sort of topics of interest which i need to update uh so stephen if you wanted to send me an email i’ll put it in the chat and then i’ll follow up with you and i’ll send you a list of some things that we’re interested in that you might fancy contributing to okay well um i just want to kind of look at the kind of the future of where the publications are going as well so both of you mentioned that um you have more of a web presence now than before um do you think that people are going to be looking more for more web-based content rather than the kind of physical copies oh yeah abs absolutely that’s just the way way of the world and it’s not just web-based content it causes apps and um phones to a certain to a certain extent um i mean i think the i think paper is going to stay around for for a while yet um but yeah no it’s it’s it’s definitely moving off into different different routes and um you know i think um i’m right in saying um i think what discussion meetings are now on on teams um but you know i think in the past they’ve also been recorded and you can get them on youtube especially the conference ones i think so definitely keep going that way and um do you think that there could be more uh of a kind of interactive thing do you do you think there could be for instance podcasts or kind of thinking about the publications in in a different way i mean definitely i think i think that’s the i think people will always like to sit back and relax with a printed thing right whether it’s a magazine a journal mean or a book um i think the the advantage of online is to you know look at different methods of content delivery whether it’s video whether it’s you know podcasts audio interviews or some of the this has been really uh really interesting uh i guess tools you might you might call them so widgets i don’t know what the right word would be um that some websites some media publications have built to sort of show the way you know you can explore data and how changing certain things you know a good example would be 538 what they do around elections and how different assumptions about polling for instance might change what your prediction or you know forecast of the of the outcome of the election might be that sort of stuff would be great to do it takes a lot of resource and time and things to build but certainly i i’m i’m interested in seeing whether we can explore that area okay and both of you mentioned as well that um you you would advise that people when they start writing that they um they start the you know that their writing and then go away for a while and go back to it and have that break um what about if they have something that’s um topical that they think is need to be is quite timely and needs to be presented and quite quickly do you think that they should just um go ahead and and submit uh what what they want to say for the sake of you know getting out there or or do you think that they should um go away and still work on it should i take that one Brian um yeah for the for the journal means um well this phrases another way there are journal means out there not published by the rss that do go in for publishing uh things really quickly so nature is kind of a good example of that i mean it has to be super prestigious and you know important that they do that for um and and you know i know i do know some other journal means in science which also publish fast moving stuff off quite often they tend to be very much shorter publications that are then followed up by longer papers but the rss doesn’t really go in for that um it’s not impossible for a paper to be published quickly but you know there’s a production schedule for you know papers to go in journal means so it could be it could be several months um what the rss does encourage uh also though is you can submit your paper to one of the public research uh repositories such as archive for example um so you can do that and then submit your paper to uh one of the rss series and you know you can publicize that archive publication to other people if you think it’s important you could say on twitter this is really important and see if people pick it up but it won’t be published by the rss necessarily for it for a bit of a while okay thank you guys and um so we are going to be coming towards the end of the session soon i just wanted to ask you if you have any kind of general uh writing tips so uh for Brian with with significance and then go the publications um so i know that you’ve both looked at getting a good writing style out of people so what are the things that people can do if they’re not if very confident in their writing what what are some of the things they can do to to up their skills and just sharpen their writing tools right basically just just keep practicing i mean um set up a blog uh you know jot down your thoughts whenever something happens that you have particular interests or take on um and you know see if you build an audience that way i mean there’s no shortage of opinions on the internet so if you write something that’s rubbish people will tell you and you can get better they learn from that and get better next time um one thing i did want to say earlier actually was that you know good a good example for if you want if you’re interested in writing for significance but you’ve had mostly uh experience writing for journal means like you know jrssa actually we’ve published quite a few articles in significance that are based on series a papers so i can you know and if people are interested i can send examples of comparing and contrasting so you can look at the series a paper and then what the same author has done for significance so you can see the the difference in approach and the way the author has had to be a bit more selective in what what they present and and how they’ve sort of restructured reordered what it is that they present in order to create that uh that narrative flow okay brilliant um so i do think unless there are any further questions um i think we will wrap up there so um thank you guy and Brian for giving us your time today it’s been really interesting to find out the similarities and differences thank you for being a part of it thank you very nice to see you all thanks yeah thanks for the questions thanks for listening okay thank you i have to go go and see to the dog now bye.