In re-reading my post from earlier this week, I went back and checked and realized that I did not have a post listing the awardees of the 2015 Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Scientific Refereeing. Each year, AGU’s journal editors get to select a few people for this award. By a few, I mean a few: up to 1% of the total number of manuscripts submitted to the journal that year. For JGR Space Physics, we had 1190 manuscript submitted in 2015, so we were able to select 12 people for this award.
This is an amazingly hard decision because so many people write outstanding reviews. Plus, there is the perennial decision of how to weight various criteria, like how many reviews someone did, their average time to submit a review, their highest or average rating (yes, we rate referees on every review), or the importance of a single review to the decision on a particular manuscript. Plus, at JGR Space Physics, we make this a group editorial decision, so all 5 of us deliberate and vote on the list.
For 2015, our 12 awardees are (in alphabetical order):
- Eric Christian
- Ingrid Cnossen
- Xueshang Feng
- Ryochi Fujii
- Manuel Lopez Puertas
- Paul O’Brien
- Minna Palmroth
- Natalia Perevalova
- Viktor Sergeev
- Kazue Takahashi
- Bruce Tsurutani
- Angelos Vourlidas
THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your outstanding service to the journal and to the research community.
I’ve said it before but it needs to be said again: I would also like to thank all of the 1,506 people that served as reviewers for JGR Space Physics in 2015. AGU rules limit our awardee number to 12, but I am grateful for the time and effort put in by every single one of you. Thanks!
Notes from the JGR-Space Physics Editor-in-Chief 
Hi Mike,
As an early career scientist, I have started being asked to review some papers and have been keen to do this. I do read and follow whatever guidlines are provided, but have wondered about the quality of the reviews I provide, and if there is anything I could do to improve them. Do you think there would be any benefit to editors sharing their assessment of the review quality with the reviewer? As much as I’m wary of having yet another metric to be assessed by, at this stage of my career I would find it useful to have some feedback on the reviews I write. As you are already producing and collecting this information, would it be difficult or detrimental to the editorial process to share it?
Pingback: Outstanding Reviewers for 2017 | Notes from the JGR-Space Physics Editor-in-Chief