In September of 2014, we held a successful editors’ meeting and decided to establish awards of JSE Outstanding Papers as one of the strategies to improve the quality of JSE in the coming years. The awards consist of two categories (i.e., the JSE Outstanding Papers and JSE Young Investigators’ Awards) and have been presented to the 20 most cited papers published in the period of 2008–2013, and four papers per year published in 2014 and 2015 to recognize the important impact of these papers in systematics and evolution. We herein announce the four papers to receive the two awards for 2016 and highlight the significance of these papers.

JSE Outstanding Papers for 2016:

1. PPG I. 2016. A community-derived classification for extant lycophytes and ferns.
2. Chen Z-D et al. 2016. Tree of life for the genera of Chinese vascular plants.

JSE Outstanding Papers by Young Investigators for 2016:

1. Grusz AL. 2016. A current perspective on apomixis in ferns.
2. Zhang T et al. 2016. Fifteen novel universal primer pairs for sequencing whole chloroplast genomes and a primer pair for nuclear ribosomal DNAs.

In conclusion, we are very proud that Journal of Systematics and Evolution has published these high-quality papers, and hope that our journal continues to attract important papers and well serve the community in plant systematics and evolution in the coming years.

Please find more detailed information of the awards in the Editorial of the March issue of 2018.