In the higher education and academic world, seeking excellence is a source of individual and collective motivation, fascination, progression and standing.

The expressions of academic excellence come in variety of forms and degree of prestige. The procedures for awarding individual and/or collective prizes and other forms of recognition can be complex and laborious, and often going beyond traditional measures of research quality or institutional performance such as, for example peer-review. While ignoring those which have a political or ideological connotations, academic awards are growingly taken into consideration in individual and institutional performance assessment.

A renewed attention to academic awards has in recent years been associated with use of them in the elaboration of university rankings, in particular to those used for Academic Ranking of World Universities [usually referred to as “the Shanghai ranking”]. It is therefore timely and relevant to look at the international diversity of expression of academic awards in order to get a more informed knowledge and formulate proposal for a more inclusive use of such awards. The “Maribor Event” is organized as the first stage of the project entitled Mapping of Academic Excellence – International Scientific Awards. The project is an initiative of the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, involving numerous partners one of them being the University of Maribor.