This brings me to nomination. What many on the outside may not know is that the number of candidates in any given annual competition is often times small. I've heard of some competitions when there were only two candidates and that is often too small of a pool to always ensure quality. What happens is that many people often assume a great candidate is already being nominated by others, only to find out that everyone else assumes the same thing, and so a very worthy candidate slips through the cracks. Making nominations, of course, takes a lot of work, so it tends not to be of high priority and often left to the last minute. There are other problems too. There may be some unconscious bias, and I don't mean this in a bad way. For example, potential nominators may tend to think about their closest or most familiar peers and inadvertently overlook some worthy candidates. For example, women can often be overlooked in a male-dominated system. Same goes for minorities or people who are shy and do not spend much time self-promoting.
If you are mid-career or higher and established, it is your obligation to promote early career scientists and one way to do it is to be a nominator and to identify worthy candidates. What makes an effective nominator. If you want to be an active nominator, it helps to have credibility and visibility, because if you are recognized for your accomplishments, then your statements carry weight. If you have yourself won awards, then someone nominated you, so it is absolutely your turn to start nominating. If you are not as well established, but have found yourself in a position of some influence, such as chair or vice-chair, you can and should still play a role in nominating. However, if you are not known in the community, it is best to work from behind the scenes and facilitate rather than lead a nomination.
So what makes a good nomination? The first criteria of course is to find the strongest candidate. I will come back to what makes a strong candidate shortly. But once you've identified a strong candidate, the nomination process is easy. You will have no problem finding supporting letter writers because writing about a great candidate is not only easy, but fun. What one should never do is force yourself to nominate someone that is not a clear cut winner. Departments these days are into self-promotion, so some departments have begun to almost formalize the nomination process of their faculty members. Even in our department, I have heard at times calls to regularly nominate faculty members, as if it were a routine thing to do. I am adamantly opposed to this. The first rule for a successful nomination is that the candidate has to be incredibly strong. Anything less not only wastes letter writers and committee time, but it also detracts from your credibility as a nominator. Nominate only when the candidate is ready. Getting awards is not supposed to be a game. If you're a nominator, you should be shooting for a high batting average, preferably home runs. The goal is not to throw in a weak or mediocre candidate, hoping you're going to get lucky. Because if you do, you will sully the reputation of the award and the entire discipline when there are others more deserving.
So what makes a strong candidate? Here, I am talking about awards for scientific accomplishment rather than service. For scientific accomplishment, the most important quality is whether the candidate has shown significant creativity in the field and appears to be leading the community in new directions. High productivity, such as in publication rate and citations, is also a plus, but should not be a pre-requisite. One must be cognizant of the fact that disciplines have very different citation metrics. If one has many citations, especially early on, it could just reflect that one is in a saturated field, which may just mean that even though the field may seem popular, nothing fundamentally new is really happening in that field. So be very careful of citations and output. If you have both - creativity and productivity - you've got a good candidate. However, if it's just productivity, your odds are low unless the committee is made up of a bunch of easily impressed bean counters, which unfortunately, can be the case. The ideal selection committee is made up of accomplished scientists who know how to recognize talent, have their finger on the pulse of the community, and know how to recognize just plain old noise. Seeing that you don't know who is on the committee, it is very important how you write your nomination.
The ideal nomination letter must get across in clear and simple terms the creative aspect of the candidate. Briefly summarize what the candidate does and then summarize her/his major accomplishments. In doing the latter, it is very important to place the accomplishments in context. How has her/his work impacted not only her field, but possibly other fields. Describe also how your candidate approaches science. Emphasize depth and versatility, if relevant. What makes your candidate different from others? All of this should be in the first two paragraphs. It should be understandable by all in your community. What you are trying to do is make it easy for a champion on the committee to make the case for your candidate.
After this introduction, you should briefly describe the key contributions (papers or sets of papers) of your candidate. Pick 3 to 5 of them and methodically explain their impact, again at a level in which everyone can understand.
Finally, at the end, you can do your obligatory accounting of publication and citation rates and H-index. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of this bean counting, but if they are high, go ahead and mention it. If they are not high, not only don't bother, but don't try to explain it away. In any case, for early career scientists, citation rates don't mean much. Focus on quality and the ability of the candidate to lead the field. I've seen too many tenure and award nomination letters focused on metrics rather than content, which not only doesn't say much about the candidate, but also gives the impression that the letter writer is lazy and doesn't really know the subject in any depth (this may not be true, but that's the impression it gives). These sorts of letters could have been written by a bot.
Now, some of you may be wondering what it takes to get nominated? Well, there really are no games and no short cuts. I know of some people that aggressively try to get themselves nominated by over-promoting themselves and getting in the networking business. Yes, indeed, networking seems to be all the craze right now. Early career scientists are getting all this advice from career counselors to network like mad, to promote oneself on social media (twitter, facebook, blog, etc.), and so forth. These are all good, but I fear that all this attention to what I consider rather superficial things, if done alone, will be detrimental. The first thing about getting awards is don't think about them and don't plan to get one. Speaking for myself, if I get a whiff that someone is angling for an award, it is a big turnoff.
The most important thing one can do, if you hope to get nominated, is to do your research, do it creatively, and then publish it, all the while having fun in doing what you do. Follow your ideas, not others. Don't follow the fad, rather let your mind wander and explore. Take your own journey. Publishing your work is probably the best networking mechanism you can get. You might, if you're lucky, get some outside recognition for that down the road, but even if you don't, you will have followed your own path, and that itself, is more rewarding than an award. If your goal is an award, you are bound to be disappointed in life. The key is to just have fun. There are no games to be played here.
And now back to the nominators themselves. I am at the stage in my career that I feel it is my obligation to be on the lookout for talent, whether in my own department or beyond. And then to promote these early career scientists for recognition, if they are deserving. But to do so, it takes work. You can't do this passively. You have to be in the know. Serve as an editor, give talks at universities, review proposals, read the literature, talk to your peers, go to conferences... watch for those who are up and coming. Imagine you are a talent scout. Leave no stone unturned. I will say one thing about mechanics. What helps nominators is if you have a regularly updated webpage AND a publicly accessible CV with all your publications. Nominations are usually done in secrecy so if you don't have your information available, it is more work for us to assemble your nomination package.
Go and nominate your colleagues, but do it responsibly.
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