Source: RISK newsletter,
Third Quarter 1996, published by the Society for Risk Analysis
Three long-time members of the Society for Risk Analysis will serve as the first area editors of Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the Society’s bimonthly publication. Those named are Vicki M. Bier, a former SRA councilor; Paul F. Deisler Jr., an SRA fellow, former president, and current chair of the Society’s Advisory Board; and Detlof von Winterfeldt, an SRA fellow.
"The creation of these positions will broaden the journal’s outreach and allow the editor-in-chief to devote more time to major policy development and special projects," said M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, SRA past president and chair of the Publications Committee. "The people we have chosen to fill these positions are leaders in the three disciplines of life sciences, social sciences, and engineering that are at the core of risk analysis and therefore of critical importance to the journal."
The editor-in-chief is Curtis C. Travis, who has served in that position since 1983. An SRA fellow and former president, Travis followed the first editor-in-chief, Robert B. Cumming, who was also the Society’s first president and has continued as senior editor of the journal. Travis has been director of the Center for Risk Management at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, since 1985.
Engineering
Bier, who is an associate professor of industrial and nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is the journal’s area editor for papers focused on engineering.
"My main goals are to increase the number of papers on engineering applications and to expand the readership of the journal among engineers," said Bier, whose personal research interests include Bayesian and classical statistical methods for the use of accident precursor data, risk analysis of nuclear plants, the use of aggregation and decomposition in estimation, human judgment and decision making under uncertainty, and the treatment of uncertainty in estimation and decision making.
She plans to solicit papers from leading practitioners and to organize special issues revolving around specific themes or conferences. "All engineering-related topics are welcome, but I would especially like to see submissions on risk-based regulation and risk-based inspection," she said.
Life Sciences
Deisler, who is a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and is retired from the position of vice president of health, safety, and the environment at Shell Oil Company, is the journal’s area editor of environmental and health sciences.
"My main goal is to cover the area as broadly as possible, but there are certain things that I’m looking for in both submitted and invited papers," said Deisler, a founding director of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology and a founding director of the American Industrial Health Council. "Above all, a paper must represent a real advance in knowledge, methods, and/or understanding in the field of risk analysis."
He will judge submissions based on the quality of logic, scientific argument, data handling, and scholarship; on the originality of the subject matter or approach; and on the significance of the topic. Clarity of expression also is important. "Authors need to avoid jargon or special terms that are not necessary for precision," he said. "Each of the journal’s papers should be understandable to readers from different parts of the broad field of risk analysis."
Social Sciences and Decision Making
The journal’s area editor of social sciences and decision making is von Winterfeldt, a professor in systems management at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
"I’d like for Risk Analysis to become the first choice of authors who want to publish their best social sciences and decision-making research on risk topics," said von Winterfeldt, who also is president and founder of Decision Insights Inc. of Newport Beach, California, which provides decision-analysis and risk-management research and consulting to government agencies and private corporations.
To achieve his goals for the journal, he plans to personally request submissions from leading researchers and to propose a three-track review process. "I think we could motivate authors by implementing a review process that has a fast track for superior papers, a regular track for high-quality papers, and early elimination for lower-end papers," he said.
He is particularly interested in receiving submissions in the areas of behavioral decision research and experimental economics.
International Submissions
All three of the new area editors emphasize that submissions are welcome from researchers in all nations around the "We welcome good papers from any country."
With regard to engineering topics, submissions from outside the United States could take the form either of straightforward engineering papers or of papers discussing some of the unique local issues involved in the application of risk analysis, Bier said. "For example, risk analyses of technologies that are particularly appropriate to developing nations might be one possibility."
Papers on social science and decision-making research in unique cultural settings or with cross-cultural themes are also encouraged, von Winterfeldt said.
Note: No papers should be sent directly to the area
editors before January 1, 1997.