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  3. ASTIN Bulletin: The Journal of the IAA
  4. Journal information
  5. Author instructions
  6. Preparing your materials
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Preparing your materials

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. 

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.

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”. 

Preparing your article for submission

1. Papers for possible publication in the ASTIN Bulletin – The Journal of the International Actuarial Association (hereinafter referred to as “ASTIN Bulletin”) should be submitted online at: 

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/astin

Receipt of the paper will be confirmed and followed by a refereeing process which will be handled by one of the editors. The editors aim to complete the refereeing of a submission in around three months.

Authors are encouraged to provide their data and code during the review process which will allow the handling editor to replicate the results. The preferred code for statistical analysis is either R or Python. For accepted papers data and code should be made available as supplementary material. Please review the ASTIN Bulletin’s research transparency policy;

2. The role of a referee is to assess the quality of the academic content of the paper. If a paper is sufficiently badly written to an extent that prevents a referee from forming a proper view of the paper’s scientific content or if it does not sufficiently meet the scope of ASTIN Bulletin, then the paper will be returned to the author unrefereed.

3. The basic elements of the journal's style have been agreed by the Editors and the Publisher and should be clear from checking a recent issue of ASTIN Bulletin. If variations are felt necessary, this should be discussed with the editor handling the paper.

4. Papers should be written in English. It is not the job of the editors, the referees or the publisher to improve the use of English in the paper; it is up to the authors to ensure that the language, spelling and grammar are of a high quality prior to the submission.

5. Authors intending to submit papers exceeding 30 pages are advised to consider splitting their contribution into shorter contributions.

6. The first page of each paper should start with the title, the name(s) of the author(s), an abstract and a list of keywords. An institutional affiliation can be placed between the name(s) of the author(s) and the abstract.

7. The address and full contact details of at least one of the authors should be typed at the end of the paper following the references.

8. All authors will be asked to submit a competing interest declaration in the submission. 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 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 interests: The author(s) declare none”.

9. Footnotes should be avoided.

10. References should be arranged alphabetically, and for the same author chronologically. Use a, b, c etc. to separate publications of the same author in the same year. For journal references give author(s), year, title, journal (in italics), volume (in boldface), and pages. For book references give author(s), year, title (in italics), publisher, and city.

Example: 

Journal articles Jewell, W.S. (1975) Regularity conditions for exact credibility. ASTIN Bulletin, 8, 336--341. Buchwalder, M., Bühlmann H., Merz, M. and Wüthrich, M.V. (2006) The mean square error of prediction in the chain ladder reserving method (Mack and Murphy revisited). ASTIN Bulletin, 36(2), 521--542.

Book Barlow, R.E. and Proschan, F. (1975) Mathematical Theory of Reliability and Life Testing. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Edited book/chapter Jewell, W.S. (1975) Model variations in credibility theory. In Credibility: Theory and Applications (ed. P.M. Kahn), pp. 193–244. New York: Academic Press.

Conference/working paper Ohlsson, E. and Lauzeningks, J. (2008) The one-year non-life insurance risk. Conference Paper, ASTIN Colloquium 2008, Manchester. De Felice, M. and Moriconi, F. (2003) Risk based capital in P&C loss reserving or stressing the triangle. Research Group on "Insurance Companies and Pension Funds", Working Paper n. 1, Rome, December 2003.

11. All mathematical symbols and equations, including those embedded within a paragraph, must be typeset using recognized mathematical typesetting software such as LaTeX, Tex, Microsoft Equation or MathType.

12. Contributions must be submitted using standard software such as LaTeX, Tex, or Word. Initial submissions to the editor must be in PDF format in a single file that incorporates all figures and tables. When a paper is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to provide all relevant files in electronic format, including separate files for each of the figures as well as the supplementary material (data and code) that is going to be made available. Figures should be submitted in black and white or in color. If color figures are provided, they will be used for the electronic version only. Author(s) may request the use of color in the print version, in which case author(s) will be required to pay the additional production costs to the publisher. Line thickness and lettering size should be sufficient to remain clear under any likely degree of reduction.

13. Contributors should provide full contact details including an e-mail address for the publisher, Cambridge University Press (CUP). Contributors should retain a copy of the final version of their article at the point of unconditional acceptance. Proofs will be e-mailed to the corresponding author, and it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to return corrections to CUP within one week of receipt. A delay in the return of proofs might result in the paper being published in a later edition of the ASTIN Bulletin.

14. Authors will receive a complimentary PDF of their article.

ASTIN Bulletin is published in both print and and online. Following publication of ASTIN Bulletin, the publisher will e-mail, on request, a PDF copy of the final version of the paper to the corresponding author. Authors of a paper have the permission of the editors and of the publisher to make this PDF version available for download from their personal web pages, no sooner than on its appearance on Cambridge Core, provided this service is free and not used for commercial gain. The downloadable version must be accompanied on the web page with a prominent statement of the full bibliographical details, a copyright notice in the name of the copyright holder (Copyright 2013 by ASTIN Bulletin – The Journal of the IAA. Reproduced with Permission.), and a link to the online edition of the journal at Cambridge Core.

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, 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.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

Authors are responsible for obtaining necessary permissions to quote or reproduce material, including figures, from already published works and/or any copyrighted material. If a figure is from another source, this should be credited appropriately in the figure legend along with any terms of any re-use.

For further advice, see this page on seeking permission to use copyrighted material.

Publishing ethics

Authors should check the publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.

Disclaimer

None of the International Actuarial Association (IAA), the Sections of the IAA or The Publisher (Cambridge University Press) is responsible for statements made or opinions expressed in the articles, criticisms and discussions published in ASTIN Bulletin. Further, any supplementary materials such as data and/or code that have been made available by the authors remain their sole property. Any data and/or code used to replicate the results during the review process were not validated. These materials are provided “as is” without any warranties of any kind including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property. The IAA and CUP does not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information. 

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.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see here).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

  • “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
  • “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information. 

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.