Author Guidelines

SORT accepts for publication only original articles that have not been submitted simultaneously to any other journal in the areas of statistics, operations research, official statistics or biometrics. Furthermore, once a paper is accepted it must not be published elsewhere in the same or similar form.

SORT is an Open Access journal which does not charge publication fees.

Articles should be preferably of an applied nature and may include computational or educational elements. Publication will be exclusively in English. All articles will be forwarded for systematic peer review by independent specialists and/or members of the Editorial Board.

Submission of papers must be in electronic form only at our RACO (Revistes Catalanes en Accés Obert) submission site. Initial submission of the paper should be a single document in PDF format, including all figures and tables embedded in the main text body. Supplementary material may be submitted by the authors at the time of submission of a paper by uploading it with the main paper at our RACO submission site. New authors: please register. Upon successful registration you will be sent an e-mail with instructions to verify your registration.

The article should be prepared in double-spaced format. SORT strongly recommends the use of its LaTeX template.

The title page must contain the following items: title, name of the author(s), professional affiliation and complete address, and an abstract (75–100 words) followed by the keywords and MSC2010 Classification of the American Mathematical Society.

Before submitting an article, the author(s) would be well advised to ensure that the text uses correct English. Otherwise the article may be returned for language improvement before entering the review process. The article must also use inclusive language, that is, language that avoids the use of certain expressions or words that might be considered to exclude particular groups of people, especially gender-specific words, such as "man", "mankind", and masculine pronouns, the use of which might be considered to exclude women. The article should also inform about whether the original data of the research takes gender into account, in order to allow the identification of possible differences.

Bibliographic references within the text must follow one of these formats, depending on the way they are cited: author surname followed by the year of publication in parentheses [e.g., Mahalanobis (1936) or Rao (1982b)]; or author surname and year in parentheses, without comma [e.g. (Mahalanobis 1936) or (Rao 1982b) or (Mahalanobis 1936, Rao 1982b)]. The complete reference citations should be listed alphabetically at the end of the article, with multiple publications by a single author listed chronologically. Examples of reference formats are as follows:

• Article: Casella, G. and Robert, C. (1998). Post-processing accept-reject samples: recycling and rescaling. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 7, 139–157.
• Book: Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S. and Rubin, D. B. (2003). Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd Ed. Chapman & Hall / CRC, New York.
• Chapter in book: Engelmann, B. (2006). Measures of a rating's discriminative power-applications and limitations. In: Engelmann, B. and Rauhmeier, R. (eds), The Basel Risk Parameters: Estimation, Validation, and Stress Testing. Springer, New York.
• Online article (put issue or page numbers and last accessed date): Marek, M. and Lesaffre, E. (2011). Hierarchical generalized linear models: The R package HGLMMM. Journal of Statistical Software, 39 (13). http://www.jstatsoft.org/v39/i13. Last accessed 28 March 2011.

Explanatory footnotes should be used only when absolutely necessary. They should be numbered sequentially and placed at the bottom of the corresponding page. Tables and figures should also be numbered sequentially.

Papers should not normally exceed about 25 pages of the PDF format (40 pages of the format provided by the SORT LaTeX template) including all figures, tables and references. Authors should consider transferring content such as long tables and supporting methodological details to the online supplementary material on the journal's web site, particularly if the paper is long.

Here there is an example of a formated article.

Authors can preprint their manuscripts during the submission process and showcase their work to the global research community, before it is accepted or published. This can be done in any non-commercial preprint server such as archiv.

Once the article has positively passed the first review round, the executive editor assigned with the evaluation of the paper will send comments and suggestions to the authors to improve the paper. At this stage, the executive editor will ask the authors to submit a revised version of the paper using the SORT LaTeX template.

Once the article has been accepted, the journal editorial office will contact the authors with further instructions about this final version, asking for the source files.

RACO registration. Upon successful registration you will be sent an e-mail with instructions to verify your registration.