Preparing your materials

The Annals of Actuarial Science (AAS) is published by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, with Cambridge University Press. The AAS publishes research in all areas of actuarial science and related fields, with the aim of promoting work that is rigorous and of clear relevance to actuarial applications. The AAS welcomes papers in life insurance, non-life insurance, pensions, health insurance, finance and investment, statistics and econometrics, insurance economics, and quantitative risk management. Furthermore, we welcome contributions in contiguous but non-traditional fields for actuaries, including (but not restricted to) machine learning/artificial intelligence, mathematical and computational finance, climate science, cyber/operational risk, and actuarial/statistical software - as long as their relevance to the insurance industry is clearly demonstrated.

Article types

The AAS publishes papers of the following type:

Original research papers*
Review papers*
Actuarial software*

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

Original Research Papers

Contributions can be methodological or empirical. Methodological papers should demonstrate relevance and applicability to insurance/actuarial problems. Empirical papers need to offer novel insights on insurance/actuarial problems. For all papers, their contribution to the actuarial literature needs to be clearly framed.

Review Papers

Review papers should give a comprehensive but succinct overview of a field of substantial current and importance to actuarial science. While we welcome reviews in contiguous non-traditional fields for actuaries, these need to be clearly embedded in the relevant actuarial literature.

Actuarial Software

We welcome contributions of open-source software, including code packages or libraries of functions, that are of relevance to academics and practitioners in actuarial science. The software may be based on methodological contributions published in the academic literature or implementation of new methods, which will be reviewed as part of the same submission. The AAS will publish a reproducible scholarly article documenting the methods used and demonstrating the use of the software, with the software itself available either in a repository or as supplementary material accompanying the article. There are some more detailed guidelines for these submissions below.

Authors of accepted articles are also welcome to submit a proposal for a practice-oriented feature in The Actuary magazine - see https://www.theactuary.com/contribute

Article preparation

When preparing your manuscript for the AAS please note:

Articles must be written in English (UK). Authors who are unsure of the quality of their written English, should consider to have their manuscripts checked by a fluent English speaker before submission; see also https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/language-services
The writing should be clear and concise. From the introduction, a well-informed reader (but not necessarily a subject specialist) should be able to understand what the paper’s aims and conclusions are, how its contribution fits into the published literature, and what the practical relevance of the paper’s results are.
The overall structure of the manuscript should be: Title; Author name(s); Abstract (150-200 words); Keywords; Correspondence details; Main text; Acknowledgements; Competing Interest Statement; Data Availability Statement; Funding Statement; References; Appendices.
Equations should be consecutively numbered and displayed.
Referencing should follow the conventions of the Harvard system.
Submitted articles should be no more than 35 pages. Authors can help ensure that their work doesn't exceed this by preparing their article using CUP's LaTeX template on Overleaf (see below). If necessary, excess material such as Appendices can be made available as Supplementary Materials.

AAS uses a standard Cambridge University Press template to structure articles. Authors have the option but are not required to use the following: CUP's medium template on Overleaf (a collaborative authoring tool that allows authors to submit directly to AAS; read more about Overleaf here). Authors who prefer to write and submit using LaTeX can download the CUP medium template files from Overleaf. Authors who do not use the template should familiarise themselves with the journal style (including referencing and numbering/labelling of Sections, Tables and Figures) by referring to published articles in the AAS as examples.

All published work should be acknowledged, and references given. The author is responsible for securing written permission to include any copyrighted material. Notwithstanding any scrutiny and any alterations made, authors remain solely responsible for the accuracy of all material provided and views expressed. Submitted papers should not have been copyrighted or submitted for possible publication elsewhere at the same time as being submitted to the AAS. Any previous publication, for example in conference proceedings, should be notified to the Editor at the time of submission. If the paper is accepted for publication, the author(s) will be asked to sign a digital author publishing agreement.

Disclosure statements

All authors must provide a competing interest, data availability and a funding statement in the manuscript ahead of the references.

Acknowledgments (optional):

Authors can provide an acknowledgments statement that recognises associates and colleagues who contributed to the article but do not meet the criteria for authorship, as well as other kinds of non-financial support from individuals and organisations. This is optional and it should not contain information that would otherwise be in data availability, competing interest and funding statements, which are required.

Competing Interests (required)

Authors must include a Competing Interest statement in their manuscript:

Competing Interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on an author’s presentation of their work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
Competing Interests do not necessarily mean that an author’s work has been compromised. Authors should declare any real or perceived Competing Interests in order to be transparent about the context of their work.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting the manuscript must include Competing Interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a Competing Interest declaration is as follows: “Competing Interests: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no Competing Interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing Interest: Author A and Author B declare none”.

Data availability statement (required)

Articles must include a Data Availability Statement, even if this is a statement that data availability does not apply to this study. Where possible authors are encouraged to make data and code available via repositories and the statement should explain how data and other resources were created, from where they are available, along with information about any restrictions on the accessibility of data and other resources. See the AAS Research Transparency policy for details and example statements.

Funding statement (required)

This must detail the sources of financial support for all authors in relation to the article, including grant numbers, or declare that no specific funding exists. The statement should also make it clear whether the funder had a role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

For example:

“This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under research grant XXXX. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: “This work received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.”

Submission system

Submission of papers should take place via ScholarOne Manuscript Central system . Please address questions on the submission process to [email protected].

Each manuscript is handled by one of the journal’s Editors. Upon submission, the handling Editor decides whether the article is potentially suitable for publication in the AAS. If so, the manuscript is reviewed by (typically two) anonymous referees. In the case of conflicting referee reports, the Editor may ask for additional input from an Associate Editor with specialised subject-expertise. Based on the referees’ recommendations, the Editor will decide whether the manuscript should be (a) rejected (b) revised and resubmitted or (c) accepted. There may be more than one round of revisions before a final decision. Please address questions relating to editorial policy to the Editor-in-Chief, Andreas Tsanakas [email protected].

Overleaf

Overleaf is a free online tool for writing and submitting scholarly manuscripts. An Overleaf template is available for this journal, which allows authors to easily comply with the journal’s guidelines. There is also a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing an article in Overleaf, you can use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the appropriate link to be directed to this journal's manuscript submission system.

Benefits of using Overleaf include:

An intuitive interface, in which authors can write in LaTeX or rich text and see a preview of their article typeset in the journal’s style
Features enabling collaboration with co-authors (the ability to share, highlight and comment on versions of articles)
Sophisticated version control
Clean PDF conversion and submission into the journal’s online manuscripts system (supporting materials can also be added during this process).

Actuarial Software

The stream on Actuarial Software seeks to publish contributions that provide to the actuarial and insurance community valuable computing tools, with clearly explained methodology and relevant practical use cases. This offering recognises the importance of practical software toolboxes to the development of actuarial research and practice.

Technical contributions can be in areas including stochastic simulation, numerical methods, machine learning, computational statistics, and data science, while possible applications include life insurance, non-life insurance, pensions, health insurance, finance and investment, econometrics, insurance economics and financial risk management - as long as their relevance to the insurance industry is clearly demonstrated and the contribution is clearly defined, including worked examples that can be reproduced by users of the tool.

All submissions, including articles and code, are subject to a rigorous process of peer-review. Note however that the journal formally publishes only the paper, while reposing appropriately the code is the authors' responsibility; see below.

Please note that the Actuarial Software stream does not publish pure methodological innovations in actuarial science or pure application of existing packages to actuarial problems / comparison of existing packages. The papers considered in this series should contribute both novel software tools and clear and detailed applications. Contributions that primarily consist of novel models or estimation procedures, should be submitted under the more general Original Research Papers stream of the AAS. Implementation of existing methods and models should not be an incremental refinement of an existing software solution, or simply a translation of an existing software solution from one language to another, unless there is a clearly motivated and justified need for such a solution.

Implementations should be written in languages widely used in industry and academia. The software published under the Actuarial Software stream of the AAS will be open-source and freely available in the public domain to potential users, for unrestricted use under a GNU General Public Licence (versions GPL-2 or GPL-3). This stream is committed to open-source free software, which respects users' essential freedoms, including the right to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes.

Submission guidelines

Provision of replication materials is required for actuarial software papers. See the AAS research transparency policy for more details.

Code can be in any of the following interpreted or compiled high-level languages that have wide utilisation in actuarial practice, e.g. R, Python, MATLAB/GNU Octave and Julia (any MATLAB script should also be proven to work in GNU Octave). Other languages may be considered subject to suitable reviewers of submissions being available; this may be particularly relevant for emerging trends such as InsureTech, RegTech and blockchain-based solutions. Any accompanying data used to reproduce code illustrations and examples must be in a suitable data format for such languages (e.g. .Rdata, Pickle, .mat, JSON, csv). Basic unit tests should be provided for the main components of the toolbox, wherever applicable. These should be summarised in the submitted paper under a section titled “Unit Testing and Validation”.

Articles must present the scope of the software and the underlying models or concepts such that readers can understand what the software does. Specifically, the article should address the following points:

Clear exposition of the real-world problem that the software is addressing and its relevance to actuarial practice.
Description of methodology, processes, algorithms, and models used, with appropriate citations; statistical/mathematical representations all methodological contributions implemented in the software.
Overview of key functionalities and reference to related or existing software packages that implement such methods and justification for the novelty of the submitted work. This can focus on aspects of estimation accuracy, computational efficiency, enhancement of existing tools that exist or integration of multiple tools to produce value-added toolboxes.
A comparison with other open-source implementations of similar models or procedures, where available, should highlight the capabilities of all implementations and the corresponding advantages or disadvantages.
The general analysis workflow must be illustrated by non-trivial case studies on synthetic and real data. Synthetic data examples should be provided that produce illustrative and informative overviews of how one may utilise the toolbox. We strongly encourage real data application of the tool and, where applicable, clear documentation of benchmarking against competitive tools. Case studies should address the tool’s relative flexibility, accuracy, computational efficiency and ease of utilisation of outputs.
Statistical choices, key settings and default settings should be explained and justified relative to the application they are intended for. Guidance on settings required for robust use of the software should be described and expectations for computing resources and run-time should be detailed.

We recognise that there is a variety of potential contributions to Actuarial Software and that that satisfying all the above requirements may in some circumstances not be applicable. If in doubt, authors are encouraged to contact the Editor-in-Chief for clarifications.

Upon acceptance, AAS publishes the article with a Data Availability Statement linking to the software. The software and replication materials should be shared via a repository that provides a DOI and stable link (e.g. see GitHub’s connection with Zenodo), which should then be cited in the paper’s Data Availability Statement. A less preferred alternative is to share the software and replication materials as Supplementary Materials via the AAS web-pages. Note however that this makes the code less discoverable and harder to run by users.

Other public repositories include: for R packages via the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN); for python solutions through GitHub on a public repository; and for MATLAB on the MATLAB File Exchange with a project-linked GitHub repository. The authors are welcome to use such repositories for sharing their work, but such dissemination does not replace the need for a repository that provides a DOI and stable link or upload to the AAS website as supplementary materials, as discussed above. It remains the contributors’ duty to maintain and respond to queries and requests regarding such code distributions.

Actuarial Software submissions should be made through the AAS ScholarOne site.

Research transparency

See the AAS's research transparency policy, which includes details of how to make replication materials available and example Data Availability Statements to use. Note that the availability of replication materials is compulsory for submissions under the Actuarial Software stream.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.

Open access

From 9 October 2024, all articles accepted in AAS are published on a Gold Open Access basis. This extends to all authors, irrespective of their institution or funding situation. As outlined on the Open Access options page, most authors are covered by Transformative Agreements that Cambridge holds with institutions worldwide. If authors are not covered by one of these agreements and have funds to pay an article processing charge from their funder or institution, they are expected to do so, though we recognise that only a small minority of authors are in this position. All authors without funding or an agreement can obtain a waiver to the charge after acceptance. Nobody is excluded from publication on financial grounds.

Publishing ethics

Cambridge University Press is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows the COPE Guidelines for resolving authorship disputes and other ethical issues in relation to publishing. For more information see this page.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Supplementary Materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, code, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

English language editing services

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.