Best Paper Awards

Lisa Stein, Josh Neufeld, Thulani Makhalanyane, and Jillian Petersen.

As the Editor-in-Chief team for The ISME Journal, we are committed to promoting excellence in all aspects of our flagship society journal. We strive to ensure rapid handling of manuscripts and quality reviews as we seek to publish the most important discoveries in microbial ecology.

As part of this philosophy, we wish to acknowledge and celebrate the most impactful articles in our journal. We use a diverse complement of article metrics related to citations, social media mentions, blog posts, and page accesses to shortlist articles that may be deserving of special recognition for a given year. Following this process, we evaluate articles for their content to help reach our final decisions.

High impact articles elevate the profile of our journal and highlight exceptional discoveries in the field of microbial ecology and, given the number of major advances that we publish each year, it is particularly difficult to only select three.

For the 2024 Best Paper Awards, we Editors-in-Chief would like to recognize the following three articles for their outstanding quality and impact. We think you will agree that these three articles nicely reflect the breadth of topics that The ISME Journal publishes each year from authors around the world.