This document provides the guidelines on the process to be instantiated in order to assign the ICSME MIP award. The process consists of the following steps:

  1. 1. The organising committee appoints the MIP Award Chairs. The ICSME General Chair and Program Chairs agree on the names of the candidate MIP Award Chairs. Normally, the candidates for such role are the Program Chairs of the edition of ICSME the MIP award refers to (i.e., edition N-10, where N is current edition). When these candidates are unavailable or are regarded as unsuitable by the ICSME GC and PCs, alternative candidates are selected among the PC members of edition N-10 who are not in conflict (i.e., have no paper potentially candidate for the MIP award) or among senior members (e.g., SC members) of the ICSME community who were active during edition N-10, but are not in conflict. Normally two MIP Award Chairs are appointed, but in exceptional circumstances having only one MIP Award Chair may be considered acceptable. GC and PCs should try to aim for two chairs.

  2. 2. Award candidates are proposed. The MIP Award Chairs produce a shortlist of candidate papers, selected from the research papers (i.e., papers under the Research Track category) published in the proceedings of edition N-10. The shortlist is normally based on quantitative indicators (e.g., number of citations) as well as qualitative indicators (e.g., impact and influence). The shortlist can be submitted to the Program Committee of the present edition for addition. PC members can suggest the addition of candidate papers to the shortlist, if such additions are properly motivated and justified.

    We would like to recommend the MIP Award Chairs to take into account eventual journal extensions of a conference paper, when assessing the impact of the conference paper; provided the ideas from the journal extension can be clearly traced back to the conference paper. Determining whether a journal article constitutes an extension of an ICSM(E) paper or should be considered as work inspired by the ICSM(E) paper is left to the MIP Award Chairs.

  3. 3. Vote. PC members of the present edition express their vote (each member can vote for one paper at most). Each vote is accompanied by a brief motivation about the selected paper.

  4. 4. Award Chairs make final decision. The MIP Award Chairs decide which paper is to be awarded. Normally, one paper is awarded and normally it is the most voted one. In case of a tie, Award Chairs will solve the tie. When a tie cannot be solved, under exceptional circumstances more than one award can be attributed. Still under exceptional circumstances and for well motivated reasons, the Award Chairs may select a paper different from the most voted one. For motivated reasons, the Award Chairs may also decide that the award will not be attributed to any paper, for a given edition of the conference.