Stafford Beer Medal Guidelines


1) Introduction

This award is named in memory of Stafford Beer, a world leader in the development of systems ideas, especially management cybernetics, and President of The OR Society 1970-71.

The Stafford Beer Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of Information Systems published in the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) within the relevant year.

2) Eligibility

Only contributions to the preceding year’s volume of the relevant journals may be considered. Contributions having a member of the Awards Panel as an author are eligible; however that member should withdraw from the judging and subsequent decision. There are no other restrictions on the eligibility of authors. If an author has been awarded a Stafford Beer Medal on a previous occasion, this does not debar the contribution from consideration.

3) Award

The award shall consist of a medal, cast in bronze and suitably engraved, together with an appropriate citation. If the contribution selected for the award is the product of more than one author, then all authors will receive the appropriate award, but the citation will make clear that this is a shared award.

4) Entry

No entry is required. The Awards Panel will consider all eligible contributions as a matter of course.

5) Selection

The Stafford Beer Medal will be awarded to the contribution which in the judgement of the Awards Panel makes the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of Information Systems and / or Knowledge Management. If the Awards Panel judges that none of the eligible contributions reaches a sufficiently high standard of excellence to merit the award of a Stafford Beer Medal, then no award shall be made.

6) Procedures

A reviewing sub-panel consisting of two or three members of the full Awards panel will be appointed. It is the responsibility of the reviewing sub-panel to scan all the issues of the relevant journals for the previous year, in order to make a recommendation to the Awards panel. The full Awards panel shall resolve any 'deadlock' in the rankings. The panel shall arrive at its final decision no later than 30 September. The Chair of the Awards Panel shall, no later than 10 October, forward to the Head of Professional Services the name(s) of the winner(s), if any, and the citation. The Head of Professional Services shall then inform the winner(s) and arrange for the award to be announced in Inside OR and for the medals to be made. The presentation of medals shall normally take place at the Blackett Lecture.

Current Awards Panel Practices

January: Allocate reviewing tasks to the members of reviewing sub-panel, who are each charged with producing, by 31 May, a shortlist of potential winners from the issues they have reviewed. The relevant editors will also be asked to submit a shortlist of 'worthy' papers.

June virtual meeting (via email): Initial shortlists from the reviewing sub-panel and the editors' recommendations are combined. If a member of the sub-panel has emerged as a short-listed author, they must be replaced at this stage. The members of the sub-panel review all the shortlisted papers and produce rankings by 31 August.

The following criteria are used:

  • impact on the real world, including OR / IS community (actual impact)
  • relevance to the real world (potential impact)
  • degree of innovation
  • quality of technical content
  • quality of writing

Each reviewing sub-panel member ranks each paper on a 1 – 5 scale under each criterion. The scores are aggregated to obtain an initial ranking, which is then discussed in order to arrive at a final ranking. If the discussions between the sub-panel members cannot be concluded satisfactorily, the debate is opened up to the full Awards panel. In order to help resolve disputes, referees' reports may be obtained for the relevant papers.

September meeting: The Awards panel reviews the rankings and determines a winner. A citation is prepared and forwarded to the Research & Publications Coordinator together with the name(s) of the winner(s) by 10 October. The Research & Publications Coordinator orders medals for presentation at the Blackett Lecture.

It is current practice that announcements relating to the Stafford Beer Medal shall be published on the society’s website as well as in Inside OR.