The primary aim of the journal is to publish original and high-quality articles that recognize statistical modelling as the general framework for the application of statistical ideas. Submissions must reflect important developments, extensions, and applications in statistical modelling. The journal also encourages submissions that describe scientifically interesting, complex or novel statistical modelling aspects from a wide diversity of disciplines, and submissions that embrace the diversity of applied statistical modelling.

An important objective and exciting feature of the journal is that the reader should be able to reproduce the results presented in published articles, apply the published techniques to their own problems, and even develop their own extensions of the methodology. To achieve this authors are strongly encouraged to make data and software available over the internet through a website linked to the journal. The website address is http://stat.uibk.ac.at/SMIJ

The journal aims to be the major resource for statistical modelling, covering both methodology and practice. Its goal is to be multidisciplinary in nature, promoting the cross-fertilization of ideas between substantive research areas, as well as providing a common forum for the comparison, unification and nurturing of modelling issues across different subjects.

The journal will have three main themes:

* New Methodology for papers on new statistical modelling ideas. These papers will be based upon a problem of real substantive interest with appropriate data.

* Practical Applications for papers on interesting practical problems which are addressed using an existing or a novel adaptation of an existing modelling technique.

* Tutorials & Reviews with papers on recent and cutting edge topics in statistical modelling.

Since "Practical Applications" manuscripts are less common in statistics journals than the other two types, it is worth being more specific concerning the types of manuscripts that fall into this category. Manuscripts should describe statistical analyses of a subject area, where the proposed analyses have rarely (if ever) been done in the application field. This is not, however, sufficient for acceptance for publication. Manuscripts should also provide a thorough literature review of how data of this type are currently handled in the literature of the application area, a review of any applications of modern statistical methodology applied to data of its type in the area, and justification as to why the work is important to the subject area, and provides gains beyond current methodology applied to the field. The methodology used should be modern and reasonably sophisticated (although not necessarily innovative) and should have few or no applications so far in the subject area literature.

The intention in publishing such manuscripts is to provide an opportunity for readers (including those from the application area) to see the potential to revolutionize data analysis in the field. It is also hoped that such publication would provide an outlet for statisticians who may get little recognition in the statistics field for excellent, non-routine, clever, state-of-the-art work in subject areas.

It is expected that the author will submit several suggestions for possible reviewers who are in the application area when submitting the manuscript.