We’re excited to launch this year’s Significance Statistical Excellence Award for Early Career Writing, a chance for emerging statistical storytellers to shine

Stories about statistics are the lifeblood of Significance. Through them we inspire each other and the wider world.

The annual Significance writing competition – formally known as the Statistical Excellence Award for Early Career Writing – casts its net across the world to find new stories and is a highlight of the magazine’s calendar.

Over the years, the competition has treated us to stories on a thrilling array of subjects. Last year, first prize went to Zhaoxi Zhang, whose article “Early Scottish statisticians and their lasting legacy” eloquently expressed why the likes of Arbuthnot, Playfair and Sinclair did so much more than crunch numbers in ivory towers. Other finalists and highly commended entrants in 2025 applied modern statistical techniques to the nineteenth-century data of medical pioneer Ignác Semmelweis, explored probability in crocheted cardigans, and considered autism therapy through a Bayesian lens. In 2024, Joseph Lam’s article “Terminating bias: How Arnold Schwarzenegger helped us understand linkage errors and biases” cleverly and humorously introduced us to an increasingly important issue in our ever more diverse society. You can read entries by previous winners and runners-up here .

There’s much more than bragging rights up for grabs. Winners and runners-up will be announced at the RSS Statistical Excellence Awards in London in July 2026, and invited to present their articles at the 2026 RSS Conference in Bournemouth, UK (7–10 September 2026) in the company of almost a thousand attendees from more than 40 countries. The winning article will be published in Significance, and the finalists’ articles on the Significance website. Highly commended places may be awarded, and published, at the judges’ discretion.

Launched in 2011, the Significance writing competition is aimed exclusively at students and early-career statisticians and data scientists. It is jointly organised by Significance and the RSS Young Statisticians Section (YSS) as part of the RSS Statistical Excellence Awards programme and entries are judged by a panel made up of YSS officers and committee members, the Significance editor and editorial board members.

Your entry could be inspired by your work or studies, by current affairs, or by one of your personal experiences, hobbies or obsessions. No topic is off-limits. So, go ahead – we’re listening!

Rules of entry

Entrants must be either (1) students currently studying for a first degree, master’s or PhD in statistics, data science or related subjects, or (2) graduates whose last qualification in statistics, data science or related subjects (whether first degree, master’s or PhD) was not more than 5 years ago.
Articles must be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length.
Articles can include tables and figures – though, for space reasons, there should be no more than five tables/figures in total.
Writing style must be accessible and engaging.
Technical terms and mathematics must be used sparingly, and suitably explained where used.
End references should be limited to 10.
Footnotes must not be used.
Only submissions in English will be considered.
Manuscripts must be original and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. You may submit articles based on work in theses or in papers that have been submitted to, or accepted by, academic journals, provided that the competition submission is sufficiently different in style and structure.
Articles must be entirely written by a human being, and not include AI-generated text from a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT unless such text is explicitly identified as such and serves the purpose of the article (e.g., it is an AI-generated sentence serving as an example in an article about LLMs).
Winners, finalists and entrants from previous years of the competition are not excluded from participating in this year’s competition.
All entries must be accompanied by our competition entry form: bit.ly/4pGLLz3
Email submissions as a text/Word file, or as a PDF, to significance@rss.org.uk.
Articles will be reviewed by a judging panel featuring representatives of both the YSS and Significance.
Up to three finalists will win a full registration to the 2026 Royal Statistical Society International Conference in Bournemouth, UK. Please note that travel and accommodation costs will not be covered.
The winning article will be published in Significance.
Runner-up articles may be published on the Significance website or in Significance magazine at the editor’s discretion.
Closing date is 31 May 2026.