Raftery has published over 100 refereed articles in statistical, sociological and other journals. His research focuses on Bayesian model selection and Bayesian model averaging, model-based clustering, inference for deterministic simulation models, and the development of new statistical methods for sociology, demography, and the environmental and health sciences.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected Member of the Sociological Research Association. He has won the Population Association of America's Clifford C. Clogg Award, the American Sociological Association's Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Distinguished Contribution to Knowledge, and the Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He is also a former Coordinating and Applications Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and a former Editor of Sociological Methodology. He was recently identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI.
Twenty-one students have obtained Ph.D.'s working under Raftery's supervision. Of these, eleven now hold university faculty positions, and eight hold research positions in industry or the nonprofit sector.