Actuarial Science as a Scientific Discipline: The Next Step, British Actuarial Journal

In consecutive guest editorials for the British Actuarial Journal (BAJ ), Jed Frees and Harry Panjer discussed the importance of scientific journals in actuarial science, and praised the recent emergence of new peer reviewed journals such as the BAJ (1995), the North American Actuarial Journal (NAAJ, 1997), and now the Annals of Actuarial Science. These positive developments reflect the remarkable expansion of actuarial science as an academic discipline, leading to the submission of hundreds of articles annually. Long gone are the days when the creation of a new journal led editors to worry that “too many journals would be chasing too few papers’’. In 1998, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (IME) increased its annual number of issues from 4 to 6.