Every second year, we award a prize for the best paper published in the International Journal of Forecasting (IJF). The prize consists of US$1000 plus an engraved plaque. In some case, we also give Outstanding Paper Awards to a few other papers, as special recognition of the work they cover, their approach, impact, etc. Awards are handed out at the time of the International Symposium on Forecasting.
This year we are giving awards to papers published over the years 2018 and 2019. We always allow for a delay after the publication period, as it gives the papers time to gain visibility and for us to reflect on their quality and relevance.
After an open nomination process, 21 unique nominations were received, for a total of 120 eligible papers. A short-listing process led by the editors of the IJF yielded a list of 5 candidate papers for the awards. They are:
- Granziera E., Sekhposyan T. (2019) Predicting relative forecasting performance: An empirical investigation
- Stiers, Dassonneville R. (2018) Affect versus cognition: Wishful thinking on election day – An analysis using exit poll data from Belgium
- Ardia D., Bluteau K., Boudt K. (2019) Questioning the news about economic growth: Sparse forecasting using thousands of news-based sentiment values
- Lahiri K., Zhao Y. (2019) International propagation of shocks: A dynamic factor model using survey forecasts
- Makridakis S., Spiliotis E., Assimakopoulos V. (2018) The M4 Competition: Results, findings, conclusions and ways forward
In principle, we would have loved to give awards to all those papers! A choice had to be made, and this was done through a voting process of the editorial board, whereby they could indicate their views on best and runner-up papers.
As a result of voting, the IJF Best Paper Award 2018-2019 was given to D. Ardia, K. Bluteau and K. Boudt, while an IJF Outstanding Paper Award 2018-2019 was given to S. Makridakis, E. Spiliotis and V. Assimakopoulos. Congratulations to all!
In general, we observe that the quality of papers published in the IJF is very high, and we are looking forward to seeing many important and impactful works being published by the journal in the future.