Report of the Editors—2017
报告了2017年皇家统计学会B辑编委会的人员变动、投稿与审稿数据，包括接受率、地区分布和审稿周期，适合关注该期刊动态的统计学者。
In the autumn of 2017, seven Associate Editors retired from the Series B Editorial Panel: Jim Griffin (University of Kent), Chenlei Leng (University of Warwick), Yufeng Liu (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Yangyuan Ma (University of South Carolina), Tyler VanderWeele (Harvard School of Public Health), Naisyin Wang (University of Michigan) and Marten Wegkamp (Cornell University). We are grateful to them for their excellent contribution to the journal. Six new Associate Editors were appointed to serve until 2021: Alexandre Belloni (Duke University), Howard Bondell (North Carolina State University), Jinyuan Chang (Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China), Yining Chen (London School of Economics and Political Science), John Duchi (Stanford University) and Wenguang Sun (University of Southern California). In addition, Alexander Aue has kindly agreed to serve another term on the Editorial Panel. We thank all members of the Panel for making the journal what it is, and for making our own work much easier. The next call for nomination of new Associate Editors will be in May 2018, with Associate Editors’ appointments normally taking effect from September. We are, of course, deeply indebted to all those who have acted as referees for the journal, as it could not survive without them. Their names are published together with those for the Society’s other two series in the final issue of Series A of the journal each year. We also thank the Royal Statistical Society staff involved in the publication process: Executive Editor Martin Owen and Journals Administrator Judith Shorten. In addition, we are pleased to announce that Simon Wood (University of Bristol) will succeed Piotr Fryzlewicz as Joint Editor from January 2018. The current (September 2017) status of the 2016–2017 submissions is as follows: accepted, 2 (0.5%); rejected, 412 (83.5%); resubmission or revision invited, 33 (6.5%); still awaiting first response, 46 (9.5%). The current status of papers submitted in the period from September 2015 to August 2016 is as follows: accepted, 18 (4%); rejected, 426 (94%); revision invited, 8 (2%); decision deferred, 3 (0.5%); still awaiting first response, 0. The geographical source of submitted papers in 2016–2017, by location of corresponding author and with the previous year’s figures in parentheses, was USA 39% (44%), UK 8% (9%), Europe, excluding the UK, 20% (20%) and the rest of the world 33% (27%). A notable feature in recent years is the increased percentage of submissions from outside Europe, the USA and UK, with about 8.5% coming from China. The rate of submissions to Series B has increased considerable recently: in the 12 months to August 31st, 2017, we had 493 new submissions, compared with 456 in the previous period. The current acceptance rate is under 10%. Although any rankings of this type should be treated with scepticism, we note that the journal maintained its rank of 2/124 in the ‘Statistics and probability’ category with an impact factor of 4.61. We work hard to minimize review times without compromising the quality of the reviewing process. The figures for the waiting time between a paper’s dispatch to a Joint Editor and the communication of a first decision to the author are shown in Table 1, where we give a response time distribution (calculated by using a Kaplan–Meier survival curve). The current tabulation shows the estimated proportion of papers with reports outstanding after t months, for t = 1, …, 9, based on all submissions for the two years September 2015–August 2017 and for the four previous 2-year periods. Time to first response: estimated survivor function The journal strives to achieve its status as the premier journal for methodological statistics. We seek theoretically justified, outstanding methodological contributions motivated by important practical applications. The Editors are keen to maintain reasonable limits to the length of published papers (i.e. no more than 24 journal pages) and ask authors to co-operate in keeping length to the minimum needed for clarity; papers that are evidently too long in relation to their novelty are typically swiftly rejected. David Dunson and Piotr Fryzlewicz (Joint Editors) October 2017