Historical volumes of Metron

Where to consult them today

The volumes of Metron are on Springer, not on this site.
Digital archive: link.springer.com/journal/40300/volumes-and-issues
The digitised archive on SpringerLink begins at volume 68 (2010).

For earlier volumes — that is, for the journal’s first ninety years — the route is library consultation or interlibrary loan. ISSN 0026-1424. In Italy, search the OPAC SBN national catalogue; elsewhere, WorldCat.

If you arrived here from a link to /volumi/... or /ultimo/..., that was the journal’s former online archive, built on a database that no longer exists. You will not find the abstract you were looking for on this page — this page exists to put you back on the right path.

How the archive was organised

Volumes are numbered in Roman numerals: vol. I in 1920, vol. LXVII in 2009, vol. LXVIII in 2010 (RePEc archive deposited by Sapienza’s statistics department). Each volume collects several issues, frequently published as double or quadruple numbers — which is why bibliographic references take forms such as Metron III(3–4) or IX(3–4).

⚠️ A trap we fell into ourselves. SpringerLink displays volumes in Arabic numerals (vol. 68, vol. 70…), which invites the conclusion that the journal changed its numbering around 2010. It did not: that is a platform rendering. The journal’s own citations remain in Roman numerals well beyond — the centenary editorial cites Metron LXIX (2011) and LXXIV (2016). When citing a volume, the Roman form is always correct.

Until Giovanni Maria Giorgi’s first term as editor (2003–2006) the journal was multilingual: Italian, English, French and German appeared side by side in the same issue, by Gini’s explicit choice. Since then it has published in English only.

Volumes worth knowing about

Volume I, issue 4 — 1921

R. A. Fisher, On the “probable error” of a coefficient of correlation deduced from a small sample, pp. 3–32.

The paper introducing what is now called Fisher’s z-transformation: the device that makes the sampling distribution of the correlation coefficient approximately normal, and therefore allows confidence intervals to be built on it. One year after its founding, the journal was carrying a foundational contribution to inferential statistics.

Volume II, issue 3 — 1923

A. Tschuprow, pp. 461–493.

Contains the idea of optimal allocation in stratified sampling — how to distribute a sample across strata so as to minimise variance. The result is now commonly attributed to Neyman (1934); Tschuprow had anticipated it by eleven years, in these pages.

Volume III, issues 3–4 — 1924

R. A. Fisher, The distribution of the partial correlation coefficient, pp. 329–333.

The exact distribution of the partial correlation coefficient. This is the reference still cited today in encyclopaedia entries on partial correlation and partial autocorrelation.

(Note: Springer gives pp. 329–333, Google Scholar 329–332. We have not inspected the printed original.)

Volume IX, issues 3–4 — 1932

One issue, two names:
– S. S. Wilks, pp. 87–126 — results from his doctoral thesis
– B. de Finetti, pp. 127–138

La Biblioteca di Metron

In the 1960s the journal added a book series devoted to disseminating the foundations of statistics and probability.

Its best-known title is the joint work of Bruno de Finetti and Leonard J. Savage:

De Finetti B., Savage L. J., Sul modo di scegliere le probabilità iniziali, Biblioteca del “Metron”, series C: Note e Commenti, Rome, Istituto di Statistica dell’Università, 1962, pp. 82–154.

De Finetti later reworked and translated its content in Probability, Induction and Statistics (The Art of Guessing), Wiley, New York, 1973. Savage was not only an author in the series but a member of Metron‘s editorial board.

A necessary clarification

This website does not hold or distribute the volumes of Metron. It holds no rights in them and is not the publisher.

The bibliographic citations on this page come from the centenary editorial published by the journal itself in 2020, and can be verified there. They serve one purpose: to let someone looking for a reference actually find it, in a library or on Springer.

Elsewhere in the archive

• Metron Archive — the journal’s history since 1920
• Corrado Gini — the founder

Sources

Domande frequenti

Where can I find the volumes of Metron today?
On Springer, at link.springer.com/journal/40300. The digital archive starts at volume 68 (2010); earlier volumes require library consultation or interlibrary loan.

Why don’t the old metronjournal.it/volumi/ links work any more?
The former online archive ran on a database that is no longer in operation. The historical URLs now redirect to this page.

Did Fisher publish in Metron?
Yes, at least two papers in the 1920s: On the “probable error” of a coefficient of correlation deduced from a small sample (1921) and The distribution of the partial correlation coefficient (1924).

Can I download PDFs of the old issues here?
No. This site holds no rights in the journal’s content and does not distribute it.