At IEEE Journal of Microwaves we believe that quality reviewers deserve some extra recognition! As such we have just established an “Outstanding Reviewers” program wherein at the end of each year, both authors and editors are solicited to search through their past papers and nominate particular reviews that made a real difference to the quality of a particular manuscript or the ability of an editor to make a decision on the true merits of a submitted paper. After considerable effort, we also convinced both the MTT Society Awards Committee and the IEEE Technical Activities Board Awards and Recognition Committee chairs that we could/should recognize individuals who have gone above and beyond in evaluating manuscripts. Especially important to the JMW Editor-in-Chief are the recommendations of authors – many of whom had lots of extra work to do after receiving their reviewer comments – in suggesting reviews that really helped them improve their submissions. It might surprise you to hear that the authors who had to do the most work to satisfy their reviewers, were the ones who made the majority of the nominations.

During the nomination and evaluation process, reviewer identities are kept completely anonymous and only the Editor-in-Chief knows the identities of the nominees.

From the 240 independent reviewers of 2023 JMW published articles who submitted their reviews between September 2022 and November 2023, we are very pleased to announce this year’s six top nominees that we are designating as our “Outstanding Reviewers of 2023”:

Professor Ivan Arregui from the Public University of Navarre (UPNA), Spain;
Research Assistant Thomas Bücher at the University of Wuppertal, Germany;
Professor José Luis Gómez Tornero with the Universidad Politecnica de Cartagena, Spain;
Professor James Kelly at Queen Mary University of London, U.K.;
Graduate student Matthias Linder at Institute of Microwave Engineering, Ulm University, Germany;
and
Professor Mario Lucido with DIEI, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy.

Each of these individuals has received a special certificate of appreciation from the MTT Society and their names were announced in the January 2024 opening editorial of IEEE Journal of Microwaves. We repeat their names here so our entire society can celebrate their achievement and hopefully inspire other researchers to participate in this most important aspect of our peer review process. Photos of our winners appear below.