Sur­vey arti­cles are par­tic­u­larly help­ful in get­ting a foothold in a new research area, or in look­ing for impor­tant papers that you may have over­looked. What­ever area of research you are in, look out for sur­vey papers and jour­nals ded­i­cated to pub­lish­ing sur­vey papers.

The jour­nal Sta­tis­tics Sur­veys is rel­a­tively new (vol­ume 1 in 2007) and pro­vides very help­ful sur­vey arti­cles of areas of sta­tis­ti­cal research. It is spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Sta­tis­ti­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, the Bernoulli Soci­ety, the Insti­tute of Math­e­mat­i­cal Sta­tis­tics, and by the Sta­tis­ti­cal Soci­ety of Canada. With that pedi­gree, the jour­nal is required read­ing for any­one doing research in statistics!

The fol­low­ing arti­cles are rec­om­mended read­ing for my research team (and any­one else work­ing in time series and forecasting):

• Holan, Lund and Davis (2010). The ARMA alpha­bet soup: A tour of ARMA model vari­ants. Sta­tist. Surv. 4, 232–274.
• Arlot and Celisse (2010). A sur­vey of cross-​​validation pro­ce­dures for model selec­tion. Sta­tist. Surv. 4 (2010), 40–79.

Another excel­lent review jour­nal from the IMS is Sta­tis­ti­cal Sci­ence. The fol­low­ing paper is essen­tial read­ing for all statisticians:

• Shmueli (2010) To Explain or to Pre­dict? Sta­tist. Sci. 25(3), 289–310.

A more long-​​standing jour­nal ded­i­cated to review arti­cles is Inter­na­tional Sta­tis­ti­cal Review, pub­lished by the Inter­na­tional Sta­tis­ti­cal Insti­tute. How­ever, I tend to find arti­cles in that jour­nal more tech­ni­cal and nar­rowly focussed than those in Sta­tis­tics Sur­veys and Sta­tis­ti­cal Sci­ence.

Related Posts:

• Jour­nal collections
• Search­ing the research literature
• RSS feeds for sta­tis­tics journals
• Researcher por­tals
• Your name is your brand