This year the Journal of Engineering Design has decided to establish an annual Best Paper Award to recognise the best contribution of the previous year. To this end, the Editors have developed a rigorous paper selection procedure and a demanding set of assessment criteria. The best paper must offer an original scientific contribution and novel results for archiving, the reported work should reflect scientifically rigorous engineering design research, the methods and results should be validated and useful, and the overall presentation should be complete, well structured and transparent.
Specific selection criteria reflect the importance of the problem and relevance to the journal, the scientific/professional value of the ideas presented, the comprehensiveness of investigations, significance and societal impacts of the findings, and the quality of conclusions. In addition, repeatability and timeliness of doing the work, consolidation of the results, reference to other critical works, clarity of writing, and quality of illustrations have been taken into account in the assessment process.
All published papers were investigated and sorted into quality categories, but only those papers that received an average of at least ‘good’ or better were considered in the quantitative assessment for final selection. A non-linear quality indicator was used to distinguish the papers with uniformly high scores.
The Editors are pleased to announce the best paper of 2008 as:
“Design evaluation of digital consumer products using virtual reality-based functional behaviour simulation”,
co-authored by
Hyungjun Park, Jeong-Soo Son and Kwan-Heng Lee, v.19, n.4, pp. 359-375.
The paper focuses on a research topic of both industrial and academic interests, provides disciplinary insights as well as operative research solutions, is reported clearly, and paves the way for future research towards advanced conceptual design and testing of a class of products. The Editor and Associate Editors would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the authors on this significant achievement and to express appreciation for their co-operation during the peer review process.