The American Physical Society (APS) has selected 150 Outstanding Referees for 2017 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals.

McMaster’s Bruce Gaulin, an experimental condensed matter physicist, is one of this year’s Outstanding Referees.

Instituted in 2008, the Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes approximately 150 of the currently active referees for their invaluable work. Comparable to Fellowship in the APS and other organizations, this is a lifetime award. The selection this year was made from 30 years of records on over 57,000 referees who have been called upon to review manuscripts, including more then 35,000 that were submitted in 2016. The basis for the Outstanding Referees selection takes into account the quality, number and timeliness of a referee’s reports, without regard for membership in the APS, country of origin, or field of research. Individuals with current or very recent direct connections to the journals, such as editors and editorial board members, were excluded.

The 2017 honorees come from 29 different countries, with large contingents from the U.S., Germany, U.K., Canada, and France. All recipients of this distinction have been notified, and sent a lapel pin and a certificate to commemorate their achievement. The selection for this achievement is always difficult and APS expresses its appreciation to all referees that help make the Physical Review collection some of the most cited physics journals in the world.

The efforts of these individuals not only keep the standards of the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors improve the quality and readability of their articles—even those that are not published by APS. The Outstanding Referees are to be congratulated and thanked for their outstanding service to the physics community.

A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online at http://journals.aps.org/OutstandingReferees.