For the last six years, Measurement Science and Technology has awarded a Best Paper prize. The Editorial Board of the journal believes that awarding such a prize is an opportunity to say `thank you' to authors for submitting their best material, and serves as a focus for their on-going quality review.

The working party, composed of R J Dewhurst, P P L Regtien and M A Player, considered a large number of papers recommended by Board Members. We would like to thank Board Members for their responses that formed an important part of the assessment process. We drew up a short-list of nine papers from the Board Member responses we received.

We re-examined these papers, with a view to finding an original contributed paper that described new and significant work, and that was presented in a clear and rigorous way. We also considered the referee-assigned quality ratings of the papers, and the number of accesses made to the papers in the Electronic Journal. We specifically excluded review papers, or papers appearing in special issues or special features that were of a review nature.

After lengthy discussions, we present the 1999 Best Paper Award to the following paper:

J Krupka, K Derzakowski, M Tobar, J Hartnett and R G Geyer Complex permittivity of some ultralow loss dielectric crystals at cryogenic temperatures 10 387-92 (published May 1999)

The award, comprising a cash honorarium and plaque, will be presented to the author at a suitable venue in the near future.

The paper describes the measurement science and technology required to conduct measurements of permittivity and the dielectric loss tangent in low-loss crystals down to 4 K. It provides a clear description of the techniques used. The quality of the data, together with comparison of values from previous published work, vindicates their measurement claims. The results presented establish a very accurate (with 0.1% tolerance) permittivity versus temperature database for a number of low-loss crystals, e.g. sapphire, YAG, quartz and SrLaAlO₄, in the 10-20 GHz region. Tan δ measurements down to 10^-8 are presented. In addition, the paper contains a solid set of references and draws together a concise set of conclusions as a summary.

We also short-listed a further three papers for the award:

T Schmitz and J Ziegert A new sensor for the micrometer-level measurement of three-dimensional, dynamic contours 10 51-62 (published February 1999)

M Höbel and K Haffner An on-line monitoring system for oil-film, pressure and temperature distributions in large-scale hydro-generator bearings 10 393-402 (published May 1999)

S Yokoyama, J Ohnishi, S Iwasaki, K Seta, H Matsumoto and N Suzuki Real-time and high-resolution absolute-distance measurement using a two-wavelength superheterodyne interferometer 10 1233-9 (published December 1999)