Journal of Geographical Systems - Annual JGS Best Paper Award & Editors’ Choice Articles
In 2020 we started two initiatives to acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding quality of research published in the journal.
First, the Annual JGS Best Paper Award, and second, the Editors’ Choice of their favourite paper of each issue. The members of the editorial board of the journal and/or the editors may nominate candidates for the JGS Best Paper award. Following the nominations, the decision about the award rests with the editors-in-chief of the journal.
All papers awarded the Annual JGS Best Paper Award can be found in one collection over here (this opens in a new tab)and all Editors’ Choice papers are collected here (this opens in a new tab).
2023 JGS Best Paper Award
In 2023 JGS published 30 papers, all undergoing a stringent peer review process. All of them are of excellent quality, making any decision about prizes normally a difficult one. In 2023 the journal published a special issue on the topic of time-geography in the age of big data, with conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions by a distinguished group of authors, who provide an update of the state of Hägerstrand’s groundbreaking ideas at a time when mobility analytics grows into a thriving field. Among several excellent papers, we are pleased to announce that our choice for 2023 JGS Best Paper Award is the work of Luyu Liu, Adam Porr, and Harvey J. Miller in recognition of their research published in the aforementioned issue. The research is summarized next and can be accessed in full via the link.
Realizable accessibility: evaluating the reliability of public transit accessibility using high-resolution real-time data
by Luyu Liu, Adam Porr, and Harvey J. Miller, published in the Journal of Geographical Systems, Issue 25(3), pages 429–451 (2023) (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-022-00382-w (this opens in a new tab)).
Accessibility is a central concept in the analysis of time–space behavior, and although it predates Hägerstrand’s contributions to time-geography, it finds a robust conceptual foundation in them. New sources of data make it possible to move from the static analysis of accessibility to less idealized representations of the potential for space–time behavior. In this piece, Liu, Porr, and Miller use real-time information about transit services to demonstrate how even small levels of unreliability can lead to realizable accessibility levels that are lower than those under perfect adherence to the transit schedule. Interestingly, the degree of unreliability grows for longer trips, which are more likely for lower income populations (e.g. Tao et al. 2023). The paper is also an example of open, reproducible research, a practice that the journal increasingly encourages (see Paez, 2021; Comber and Brunsdon, 2021). All code and data used in the paper are available publicly at https://github.com/luyuliu/Realizable-Accessibility (this opens in a new tab).
On behalf of the editors-in-chief and the editorial team of Journal of Geographical Systems, our warmest congratulations to the 2023 awardees of the JGS Best Paper Award!