Following on from the good practice seen in other IWA Publishing journals, Water Supply introduces the Editor's Choice of an outstanding paper, starting from Volume 20, Issue 6. This aims to showcase the high quality of contributions to our journal and to recognise the efforts of our authors from around the world. The papers that will be recommended in this way will be selected because it is hoped that readers will find them particularly interesting in terms of novel methodologies demonstrated through observation and modelling data.

Selecting one out of thirty-five excellent publications is not an easy task and my initial shortlists were not really short. I am pleased to commend the paper entitled ‘Leakage estimation in water networks based on the BABE and MNF analyses: a case study in Gavankola village, Iran’ co-authored by S. M. Negharchi and R. Shafaghat from the Babol Noshirvani University of Technology. This paper analysed the ever-critical problem of leakage by elegantly combining different methods and making use of one month of pressure and flow rate data. Their case study was a rather small area – the village has only eight kilometres of pipes and three hundred connections – but the authors captured this system's functioning well, including specifics such as private tanks and customer night use. This paper nicely illustrates the important point that even with a modest field measurement campaign one can collect useful data that can be intelligently employed to assess processes in the system. The results were looked at in the context of national guidelines and international studies, and all data are provided in the Supplementary Material, which enables readers to use them.

Please keep an eye open for our future Editor's Choice papers that my colleagues from the WS Editorial Board will be recommending to the readership.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits copying, adaptation and redistribution, provided the original work is properly cited (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).