The Journal of European Social Policy (JESP) and the European Social Policy Analysis network (ESPAnet) are offering a prize to the best paper by a doctoral researcher presented at any of the ESPAnet conferences, workshops or seminars in 2024 or 2025.
The prize-winning paper is provided with high-profile opportunity of publication in JESP, and the winner also receives 1 year’s free subscription to the journal.
Deadline of submissions: 28 February 2026.
Submission rules
Papers must have been presented at, or contributed to, an ESPAnet workshop, conference or seminar in 2024 or 2025. Authors should not have been awarded their doctorate at the time of presentation. Jointly authored papers are acceptable, provided that none of the authors had been awarded their doctorate at the time of presentation.
Submissions must address an aspect of comparative social policy and they should contribute to our understanding of social policy in Europe. Otherwise papers are free in their choice of subject, country/countries, theoretical perspective, methods and discipline.
Authors are encouraged to revise their papers in the period between presentation at an ESPAnet event and the submission deadline.
Submission process
To enter this prize authors should email their papers to kenneth.nelson@spi.ox.ac.uk on or before the deadline. In the subject line of the email please state “JESP/ESPAnet Doctoral Researcher Prize 2025.”
Please attach the following to your email (in MS word format):
- A separate title page containing the title of your paper, your full contact details, institutional affiliation, name of PhD supervisor, and ESPAnet event at which the paper was presented.
- An anonymous separate word document containing the paper’s title and abstract (abstract of no more than 150 words) and the main text of the article.
Submissions should follow the JESP house style. Details are available on the journal website.
Criteria for assessment
All submissions will be judged by two JESP editorial board members and one ESPAnet board member. The judges are particularly looking for exciting, innovative scholarly work, which challenges existing perspectives; poses new research problems and develops answers that offer sophisticated or subtle insights and interpretations from empirical evidence; and/or which develops new methods, or applies old methods in new ways to illuminate our understanding.
Judges are specifically requested to assess and rank the submitted papers in terms of:
- their scholarly interest and originality
- analytical and, where appropriate, methodological rigour
- quality, coherence and structure of argument
- publishable quality following one set of relatively minor revisions, and where necessary, clarification/improvement of language.
Please note: If the judges conclude that none of the submitted papers meets the required standard, the prize will not be awarded.
For further information please contact Kenneth.nelson@spi.ox.ac.uk.
Many thanks,
JESP editors