Awards submission season is here again!
10 June 2013

Two of the awards that are linked to IJMR are based on papers published throughout a year – the MRS Silver Medal and the IJMR Collaborative Award. The only way to be eligible is to have been published in a given period of time, so if you don’t submit a paper to IJMR you will never be eligible!

The MRS Innovation in Methodology award is also based on papers published in IJMR (as was the 2012 winner) and presented at the MRS & BIG/MRS conference, however authors can also submit an entry, but it must have been published in the public domain. 

Details can be found here. 

Three years ago we launched the IJMR Young Research Writer (YRW) award, aimed at those with less than five years experience in research to demonstrated their ability to write an engaging, evidence based article describing an innovative research project they’d worked on, or on a research related topic, or issue, they felt passionate about. 

The winning, and finalist entries are published in IJMR (see IJMR Vol. 55 Issue 1 for the 2012 articles) and we also invite the winner and finalists each year to present their submission at the January R-net evening meeting. I chair these particular meetings and they attract a good turnout of young researchers, with a lively discussion of the issues raised by the speakers. 

At the end of this year’s meeting, I asked the audience what prevented them from entering in 2013. The main reason appeared be a lack of confidence in having anything of value to say. 

The three speakers all said that this had been an issue for them, but their confidence had increased with the experience of writing their entry. 

Then, one member of the audience, a recruitment consultant, strongly advocated submitting an entry as it provided an important element of positive differentiation in a CV – even if an entry wasn’t selected as a finalist. 

The 2013 YRW competition is open, with submissions needed by 13th September so please either enter yourself, or encourage eligible colleagues to do so. Find links to the winning and finalist entries from 2012 and 2011, the judges’ citations and comments based on the 2011 submissions.

All you need to know about MRS Awards

For full details of all the awards see www.mrs.org.uk/awards.