Best Paper Awards

A Best Paper Award / Best Student Paper Award consisting of USD300 and an electronic certificate will be made to the presenter of the best paper at each ACEE conference. Although a paper may be nominated in more than one award category, no paper is allowed to win more than one award.

Purpose:

The purpose of the Best Paper Award is to recognize and promote quality contributions to academic research and writing among scholars and students who present papers at each ACEE conference.

The Best Student Paper Award is established to encourage and recognize papers presented at each ACEE conference with graduate students or undergraduate students as the first authors.

Eligibility:

All full papers published in the ACEE proceedings (i.e., at least one author of each paper is registering for conference participation), regardless of the status of the first authors (i.e., scholar, student, educator, policy maker or professional, etc.) are eligible for competition for the Best Paper Award.

All full papers published in the ACEE proceedings (i.e., at least one author of each paper is registering for conference participation) with graduate students or undergraduate students as the first authors (known as “student paper” hereafter; while the rest of the papers are known as “non-student paper” hereafter) are eligible for competition for the Best Student Paper Award.

In this regard, any paper with a student as the first author is eligible for both Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award. A paper whose first author is not a student is only eligible for Best Paper Award but not Best Student Paper Award.

Winners of both awards are to be selected by award selection committees from candidate papers. Full details on the selection processes will be given in the “Best Paper Award Selection Criteria” section of this document.

Nominees who fail to present their papers at the conference will be automatically disqualified.

Selection Criteria:

Papers will be reviewed and judged based on the criteria described below. Each paper will be given a score of 0 – 10 (where 0 is the lowest and 10 is the highest score) against each criterion.

The score allocated to each paper by each reviewer shall be multiplied by the weighting and then added. The highest scoring paper shall be recommended for the Best Paper Award. Where two or more papers receive the same total score, the paper which has the highest score in the highest weighted criteria shall be recommended for the award. If the papers are still tied, the highest score in the second highest weighted criteria will be recommended for the award, and so until a winner is found.

Criteria:

(1) Originality (weighting 30%)

Originality of contribution to knowledge with an emphasis on the paper’s innovativeness in one or more of; (i) theoretical development, (ii) empirical results or, (iii) policy development

(2) Quality of Argument (weighting 30%)

Quality of argument incorporating; (i) critical analysis of concepts, theories and findings, and (ii) consistency and coherency of debate

(3) Positioning (weighting 20%)

Clear positioning of paper in existing international literature with a conclusion(s) that is both convincing and of significant potential

(4) Writing Style (weighting 20%)

Quality of writing style in term of accuracy, clarity, readability, and organization of the paper