ISS Social Justice Best Paper Award – 2026
Call for Nominations
The INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) invites nominations for the ISS Social Justice Best Paper Award. Founded by Professors Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose, this best paper award's purpose is to foster and encourage high quality IS research that makes an impact towards improving social justice outcomes. The award's concept of social justice research is broadly scoped to include all facets of modern IS, analytics, digital platforms and AI perspectives, as well as the full palette of methodologies. It specifically aims to direct, recognize and reward IS research that helps positively move the interlocking gears of education, housing, healthcare, transportation, employment, income, gender equity and criminal justice outcomes and policies.
Eligibility
The ISS Social Justice Best Paper Award process is governed by ISS. In steady state, the candidate pool of papers meeting the social justice theme from manuscripts published in Management Science (MS), Information Systems Research (ISR) or MIS Quarterly (MISQ) between 2016 - 2026 (i.e., previous 10 years) will be shortlisted and considered. Papers will be nominated by the current editorial board members (SEs and AEs) of the three journals.
Submission Instructions
The nomination should include a brief (not to exceed two pages) nomination letter describing how the paper advances the social justice theme and its contribution to research and practice, and should be accompanied by a copy of the nominated paper. All materials must be combined into a single PDF.
Nominations must be submitted through the ISS 2026 Awards nomination portal (Qualtrics): https://commercevirginia.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5i38OVCe2w1GcGa. The deadline for submission of nominations is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on August 8, 2026.
Process and Timeline
The committee members are Ahmed Abbasi (Chair), Gal Oestreicher-Singer, Anjana Susarla, Ling Xue, and Jingjing Li (ex-officio, Vice President-ISS).
The award selection committee will deliberate upon the pool of nominees and other deserving papers, solely based on the information available in the nomination letters and the nominated papers, and make recommendations to the President of ISS. Winners of the award will be notified before the CIST. To be fair to all nominees, the selection committee cannot review new information about the nominees nor will the committee revote on the nominees after the notifications have been sent to the winners and nominators. We kindly request nominators of the non-selected nominees to provide additional information about their nominees in the nomination letters the next year.
The society will announce the full list of 2026 ISS Social Justice Best Paper Award winners and present them with award plaques at the ISS Award session during the 2026 Conference on Information Systems Technology (CIST) in San Francisco, CA. We invite the winners and all of our members to come celebrate the winners' as well as our society's achievements at the Award session. Organization details of this celebration event will be updated later. Prior to the Award session, winners may individually share the good news with their deans, department heads, nominators, mentors and mentees, but the winners and others aware of the winning results should not reveal such information via online social media.
While there is no guarantee that a deserving paper will meet the stated objectives of the award each year, should a winner emerge, the award will be given out at the ISS award event during the annual INFORMS conference.
It is a condition of the award that the ISS Social Justice Best Paper Award winner be a member of ISS, and, except for unusual circumstances approved by the President of ISS, remain a member of the Society until they retire from full-time work.