The International Journal of Forecasting (IJF) is the leading journal in its field and is an official publication of the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF). Published quarterly by Elsevier, its objective, and that of the IIF, is to unify the field of forecasting and to bridge the gap between theory and practice, making forecasting useful and relevant for decision and policy makers.

The IJF publishes high quality refereed papers covering all aspects of forecasting, including forecasting methods, applications, implementation, evaluation, and organizational behavior. Features of the IJF include refereed research papers, book reviews, notes, and editorials. The journal publishes occasional special issues on topics of interest to forecasters and decision makers.

For information about citations, metrics and submission times, see the 2023 annual report.

IIF members receive the IJF as part of their membership. Members can access journal articles online at ScienceDirect. If you are a new member, you must create an account to get started.

Topics Covered in the IJF

• economic and econometric forecasting
• marketing forecasting
• new products forecasting
• financial forecasting
• operations forecasting
• technological forecasting
• forecasting applications in business, government, and the military
• demographic forecasting
• energy forecasting
• climate forecasting
• crime forecasting
• seasonal adjustments and forecasting
• time series forecasting
• legal and political aspects of forecasting
• implementation of forecasting
• judgmental/psychological aspects of forecasting
• impact of forecast uncertainty on decision making
• organizational aspects of forecasting
• evaluation of forecasting methods and approaches

Objectivity

To ensure fairness and objectivity, double-blind reviewing will be used.

Data and code sharing, as well as reproducibility policy

From July 2023, the IJF has enforced a new publication policy, that makes data and code sharing mandatory, unless authors provide acceptable motivations to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal for why the data and/or code cannot be shared. We expect that, in practice, more than 90% of the papers the journal publishes will be accompanied by data and code. This will have the effect to increase trust in the work published, as well as impact.

In addition, the IJF has developed its own reproducibility policy. While we always encouraged authors to reproduce works published by the journal (for the same data, and possibly other data), we will now systematically submit papers through reproducibility checks. In practice this means that, at the end of the review and editorial process, manuscript acceptance will be conditioned to passing a reproducibility check. The reproducibility check process is led by the Editor-in-Chief.

There are 3 potential outcomes for these reproducibility checks:
– “pass” – in that case, the paper is accepted and sent to the production team for final publication;
– “minor concerns” – it means that the results obtained through the reproducibility check deviates from the results shown in the paper. The authors will be given a chance to clarify the situation and double-check, in order to converge to a final version of the results and of the paper;
– “major discrepancies” – the reproducibility check processed has revealed that the results of the paper cannot be reproduced. In that case, the paper cannot be accepted for publication.

We are confident that, while this may represent an increased workload for the authors and the journal editors, this will also increase trust and impact for those papers published by the journal.

Book reviews

Contact Dr Mahdi Abolghasemi if you are interested in reviewing books for the IJF.