Rob's blog

Actuarial Research Resources

As I have become more interested in actuarial research (mainly GI/P&C) I have realised that beyond web search I didn't really know where to look. After a bit of research I have collected the following sources.

My general impression is that collation of actuarial research is in a poor state. While there is a lot of interesting research and dedicated people furthering the profession, the research is not as accessible as it should be. A lot of my criticisms are probably echoed in other disciplines but measured against the 'ideal' things could be much better.

Far to much research does not make it into a journal or other well cataloged resource (e.g. papers for GIRO) making them hard find. I single out the IFoA website for particular criticism as finding GIRO papers is far too difficult (try finding papers from the most recent GIRO conference). The CAS website is well laid out in comparison.
Perhaps I should not have skipped the Introduction to the Library talk when I started university but to get access to journals such as BAJ or ASS is very difficult. The IFoA provides a means to access the journals (more below) but even that is hard to find.
A lot of papers lack the basics such as the paper's date and the forum in which it was made available, particularly for older papers. Even some fairly recent papers are poor quality scans.
If papers and presentations are made available on the web the URLs can change. A lot of scientific literature has adopted DOI's to enable a reliable way of linking to research but this has not been adopted by CAS or IFoA for non-journal material.
In 2018, why are we still sharing research by PDF? There has been a lot of talk about this across the scientific community as this Atlantic article summarises well. Markus Gesmann's blog is a great example of how research can be made more useful combining his thoughts with the code, data and hyperlinks to the references he has used - so much more useful than a PDF.