Dear all,
We are pleased to announce a call for manuscripts for a special issue of Statistica Sinica, titled “Covariate Adaptive Randomization and Covariate Adjusted Analysis in Clinical Trials.”

We cordially invite members of the academic community, industry, regulatory agencies, and the wider scientific community to submit manuscripts. We kindly request that submission topics focus on areas related to Covariate Adaptive Randomization (CAR) in clinical trials. Here, CAR broadly encompasses a variety of adaptive randomization strategies where covariates play a crucial role, including, but not limited to, covariate adaptive designs, covariate-adjusted response-adaptive designs, adaptive enrichment designs, and contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms (non-covariate-based bandit algorithms, thus out of the scope of this special issue). Below, we list some sample topics that may be of potential interest:

●Novel CAR strategies with favorable balancing performance or handling large numbers of covariates, with applications in clinical trials, A/B tests, and randomized experiments
● New statistical inference tools addressing limitations in existing methods for analyzing data collected from CAR, such as subgroup identification methods respecting CAR data structure, or covariate-adjusted estimators to improve treatment effect estimation efficiency
● Methods for handling data quality issues (missingness, measurement error, misclassification) for the implementation of CAR
● Methods to enable the effective use of historical and external data to assist CAR with valid statistical inference
● Methods to enable machine learning and artificial intelligence to assist CAR and inference
● Approaches to benchmark or compare CAR with other methods for balancing covariates

The direct use of new methodology in real-world clinical trials, randomized experiments, or online A/B tests is of high interest and greatly welcomed to be included wherever possible but not required. Lastly, we kindly emphasize that submitted manuscripts should contribute to the field of CAR to ensure their suitability for the special issue.

The special issue will be published only in online versions, with exactly the same style, editing, peer review process, and publication standard as the regular versions. The only difference will be that the publisher will not print the hard copies to be sent to hard-copy subscribers.

All articles for this special issue should be submitted through ScholarOne. During submission, please check the option “Special Issue Paper: Covariate Adaptive Randomization (CAR)” for manuscript type, and mark clearly in your cover letter that the manuscripts are for the theme topic of "Special Issue Paper: Covariate Adaptive Randomization (CAR). Papers submitted by 12/31/2025 will be given full consideration. If there is any question, please reach out to the guest editors of the special issue: Hongjian Zhu (hongjian.zhu@abbvie.com), Wei Ma (mawei@ruc.edu.cn), Jingshen Wang (jingshenwang@berkeley.edu), or Feifang Hu (feifang@gwu.edu).

Best regards,
Hongjian Zhu, Wei Ma, Jingshen Wang and Feifang Hu
Guest Editors for the Special Issue on Covariate Adaptive Randomization and Covariate Adjusted Analysis in Clinical Trials