Decision Sciences finalists | RCI Subject Awards 2026

Finalists, not winners. Each subject has ten finalist universities; each is represented by an academic and a project identified from the open scholarly record, with the paper cited so every claim can be checked. The exact positions publish with the full index on 15 September 2026 at 09:00 UK, when the awards become a headline strand of the global launch. Winners are decided by editorial review and announced on 15 September 2026. The Subject Awards are exclusive to partner universities.

The finalists

Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.

Nicholas A. Murphy

🇺🇸 Harvard University · Co-author

Making an executable paper with the Python in Heliophysics Community to foster open science and improve reproducibility

Science is stronger when anyone can retrace every step behind a result. The team created the first executable paper in heliophysics, an interactive document that places the publication's text alongside its code, data and dependencies in a containerised environment, and presents an adaptable workflow for comparing magnetosphere models with spacecraft observations.

Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences · 2023 · 13 citations

Elie A. Akl

🇨🇦 McMaster University · Co-author

The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews

Systematic reviews underpin evidence-based decisions across science and medicine, and readers need to see clearly why a review was done, what its authors did, and what they found. The project presents the PRISMA 2020 statement, a 27-item checklist with expanded guidance and revised flow diagrams that updates the 2009 standard to reflect a decade of advances in identifying, selecting, appraising and synthesising studies.

Systematic Reviews · 2021 · 13,862 citations · co-authors across 9 countries

Tari Turner

🇦🇺 Professor (Research); Director, Australian Living Evidence Collaboration, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University · Co-author

The Australian living guidelines for the clinical care of people with COVID-19: What worked, what didn't and why, a mixed methods process evaluation

Tari Turner, Professor (Research) and Director of the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration at Monash University, led the mixed methods evaluation of Australia's national living COVID-19 guidelines, showing how continuously updated evidence synthesis can guide clinical decisions at national scale and drawing lessons for the future of living guideline programmes.

PLOS ONE · 2022 · 25 citations

Susan Michie

🇬🇧 Professor of Health Psychology; Director, Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London · Co-author

Representation of behaviour change interventions and their evaluation: Development of the Upper Level of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology

Susan Michie, Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL, co-developed the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology with collaborators across several universities, creating a shared framework for representing interventions and their evaluation that enables machine-assisted evidence synthesis and more precise decision making in behavioural science.

Wellcome Open Research · 2021 · 95 citations

Lidwine B. Mokkink

🇳🇱 Amsterdam UMC / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · Corresponding author

“Together, we succeed in gaining a better understanding of measurements. We learn with and from each other in the free online COSMIN Clubs.”

COSMIN guideline for systematic reviews of patient-reported outcome measures version 2.0

Choosing the right questionnaire to capture patients' own experience of their health is harder than it sounds. The work updates the COSMIN guideline for systematic reviews of patient-reported outcome measures, including its risk-of-bias checklist and criteria for good measurement properties, placing fresh emphasis on well-defined research questions, comprehensive search strategies and rigorous assessment.

Quality of Life Research · 2024 · 377 citations

Christopher Southan

🇬🇧 University of Edinburgh · Co-author

BindingDB in 2024: a FAIR knowledgebase of protein-small molecule binding data

Behind many advances in medicinal chemistry sits carefully curated data. The work reports the 2024 update of BindingDB, a public database of experimentally measured binding affinities that now holds 2.9 million measurements spanning 1.3 million compounds and thousands of protein targets, supporting applications from biochemical pathway annotation to the training of artificial intelligence models.

Nucleic Acids Research · 2024 · 206 citations · co-authors across 2 countries

Manoj Lalu

🇨🇦 Associate Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, University of Ottawa; Scientist, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, University of Ottawa · Co-author

The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews

Manoj Lalu, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Ottawa and Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, co-authored the PRISMA 2020 statement, the international guideline for reporting systematic reviews, and leads translational meta-research improving the rigour and transparency of evidence that informs clinical decisions.

BMJ · 2021 · 89,218 citations

Pedro Bordalo

🇬🇧 University of Oxford · Lead author

Salience

Why do vivid, surprising or prominent things sway our choices more than they should? Reviewing fast-growing research on salience, the work shows how bottom-up attention can distort economic decisions, unifying probability weighting, menu effects, reference points and framing within one approach, and pointing to potential applications in finance, industrial organisation, advertising and politics.

Annual Review of Economics · 2022 · 246 citations · co-authors across 3 countries

Andrea C. Tricco

🇨🇦 University of Toronto · Co-author

The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews

Systematic reviews underpin decisions in healthcare and beyond, but they are only as useful as their reporting is transparent. This work presents PRISMA 2020, an updated 27-item checklist with detailed recommendations and revised flow diagrams, helping reviewers explain clearly why a review was done, what the authors did, and what they found.

BMJ · 2021 · 102,961 citations · co-authors across 10 countries

Isabelle Boutron

🇫🇷 Université Paris Cité · Co-author

Using Risk of Bias 2 to assess results from randomised controlled trials: guidance from Cochrane

Judging whether the results of randomised controlled trials can be trusted is central to any systematic review. Drawing on Cochrane's phased introduction of the Risk of Bias 2 tool, launched in 2019 to improve usability and reflect current understanding of how the causes of bias influence study results, the work distils practical guidance and learning for systematic reviewers.

BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine · 2023 · 244 citations · co-authors across 3 countries

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The Subject Awards are open to partner universities.

Partners verify their data, feature their academics, and are eligible for the Subject Awards. Finalists are identified from open data; winners are decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.

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