At the start of each year, the member of the NAMES Editorial Board review all of the articles 1 that were published in the volume of the previous year to determine which works stand above all the rest. 2 Thanks to the increasingly high standards which submissions are expected to meet before being accepted for publication, the quality of each year's candidates is exceptionally high.Consequently, the selection process is notoriously difficult for the Board.As one of the evaluator's observed: "the range of topics, the global diversity of scholarship, and the overall quality of the articles make evaluation very difficult.All 2025 entries are worthy".Ultimately, the difficulty in making a decision is directly correlated with the quality of the journal.The more arduous the selection process, the higher the scholarship of the submissions accepted for publication.To help ensure that the assessment procedures are both transparent and consistent, all potential candidates are evaluated across the following three criteria: (1) creativity and originality; (2) potential scholarly contribution to onomastics; and (3) writing style and organization.The use of these pre-determined standards is particularly important given the tremendous variety in the subject-matter and approaches utilized in the publications under consideration.After reading each article, the Board members are asked to cast their vote for the three articles they identified as achieving the highest scores for the above-mentioned criteria.They are asked to provide an explanation of the exact reasoning for their selections.Once they have completed their evaluations, the Board members are asked to submit their ballots to the Editor-in-Chief by a specified deadline.
I. M. Nick (2026) studied this question.