It is very unusual for a news­pa­per arti­cle to cite an aca­d­e­mic paper, unless it is in Nature, Sci­ence or the Lancet. Mostly, what we write is too tech­ni­cal and assumes too much back­ground knowl­edge for it to be acces­si­ble to any­one but spe­cial­ists. So I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find a ref­er­ence to the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing in a recent Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle. It is a cita­tion of a 1996 arti­cle, so in terms of sci­en­tific research it is a bit like quot­ing the Magna Carta, but a cita­tion nevertheless.

I once tried to get news­pa­per cov­er­age of a spe­cial issue of the IJF on fore­cast­ing the US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. It was pub­lished about four months before the 2008 elec­tions. If any­thing was going to attract the atten­tion of the pop­u­lar press, surely this was the topic! Alas, all we man­aged was a short piece on a  research news web­site although there were copi­ous arti­cles on pre­dict­ing the elec­tion result based on less valid methods.

Even fore­cast­ing the recent world cup didn’t get any seri­ous atten­tion, despite some excel­lent (albeit unpub­lished) work over at kag​gle​.com. Paul the Octo­pus had tens of thou­sands of news arti­cles, but the care­ful sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el­ling at kag­gle had none at all that I could find.

All of which goes to show that news­pa­pers are not good sources of infor­ma­tion about fore­cast­ing (or any­thing else?).

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• Access­ing jour­nal arti­cles online
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