A nomination shall be prepared by a full or a retired member of INFORMS (the nominator). The nominator is responsible for securing exactly three persons to serve as references for the nominee. At least one of the references must be an INFORMS Fellow and the remaining references should be current regular or retired members of INFORMS. Members of the Selection Committee may not serve as references. The nominator and at most one of the reference letters can be from the same institution as the nominee.

The nominator should review the Eligibility rules and the Criteria for selection on the INFORMS web page to ensure that the nomination letter is consistent with the guidelines. In particular, it is important to emphasize that the contributions of the nominee will be evaluated in each of the following five categories: research, practice, management, education, and service, and the nominee’s record must be truly outstanding in at least one of these categories.  These categories are considered equivalent in importance.

In cases where the nominee is distinguished in practice or in management, where much of the work is internal to an organization and is proprietary or classified, the membership requirements for references may be relaxed if necessary. In cases where the nominee's accomplishments are primarily internal, it will be acceptable to have more than one of the references from the nominee’s organization.

The nomination form, the reference letters, and the nominee’s CV/resume constitute the prime documentation and provide the basis for the evaluation of the nominee. The nominator is encouraged to review the CV/resume provided by the nominee, and to ask the nominee to condense or to eliminate superfluous information not related to the five categories used for the evaluation of the individual. The nomination and reference letters should help to explain the impacts of the nominee’s work with respect to one or more of the five evaluation categories in ways that may not be obvious from the CV/resume.

Every nomination must include a proposed citation of merit for the nominee, to be used as the initial draft of an official citation if the nominee is selected to receive the Fellow Award. The proposed citation should avoid glorifying adjectives, emphasize the particular criteria for which the nominee’s record is most notable, be specific, and be no more than about 30 words in length. The Organizing Committee reserves the right to request or make changes to proposed citations in order to adhere to these guidelines, and also for the sake of stylistic consistency across citations or felicity of expression.

The individuals who serve as references must be established experts qualified to independently evaluate the nominee's contributions and clearly establish the scope and significance of the nominee's accomplishments.

Published research provides a supplementary means of supporting such assessments. For individuals whose distinction arises in areas other than research, the details are provided by the nominator and references are of paramount importance. Where the nominee's contributions are proprietary or classified, the references must have both the expertise and the access to evaluate those contributions. No proprietary or classified information shall be provided to the Fellows Selection Committee; however, the references should address the technical contributions, impact, and significance of the nominee's contributions in a non-proprietary or unclassified manner.

The Fellows Selection Committee is not responsible for developing supporting information on behalf of a nominee.