Yes, it's that Critics' Poll time again, when we bother lots of busy people in the world roots & folk biz to come up with their favourite albums of the past year. The four above headed the list and become the nominees for the BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music Album Of The Year, and we also reveal the Best Compilation of 2003.

Our long-running Critics' Poll is now firmly established as the Critics' Award For Album Of The Year in the BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music. So once again this year we invited contributions from a few hundred well-informed journalists, radio presenters, promoters, record label and dealer staff, musicians and people from all walks of the roots music business internationally to give us the benefit of their judgement. Between them, in the course of their work or listening, they are likely to have heard a far wider range of the year's releases - either across the board or in their own specific fields of expertise - than the average. As ever, this is the best researched guide to the key world roots and folk albums of the year that you will encounter anywhere.

We can't reveal the winner out of the top 4 nominated albums - listed alphabetically here - just yet. You'll find that out when the winners of all the Awards categories are announced on BBC Radio 3's World Routes, coming live from Soho's Ronnie Scott's at 3pm on Saturday January 31st.

Obviously we can't yet tell you how all the individual experts voted or you could get going with a calculator and work out the winner. We'll be putting those lists up here from February 2nd as a downloadable PDF that you can print and store in your magazine if that's what takes your fancy. Patience!

As usual we asked our panel to each nominate 6 new albums and 4 re-issues/ compilations. We gave every nomination a point each. The main provisos were that albums should have been first released since December 2002 and fall into the areas of music we cover in fR - music from anywhere with roots in a tradition. And as ever, good taste and the editor decreed that people were not allowed to vote for their own products or those of the companies they work for.

As with every year, there were a few releases that caused confusion as to which section they fell in or when they were released. This year we got quite a few late votes for Ojos De Brujo's Bari, Kristi Stassinopoulou's The Secrets Of The Rocks and the Red Hot & Riot compilation, all of which were ineligible as they were first released before (and indeed nominated in) last year's poll. Oumou Sangare's album Oumou - a mixture of tracks from her previous UK CDs and a Malian album that never came out here - also confused some people who placed it in the new albums section. We moved those into the re-issues/ compilations count and amalgamated all the votes together.

The poll is in two sections. The first is simply for newly recorded single artist albums (soloists or groups) and produces the four nominations for the BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music. The second section is for compilations, for anything that would be listed as "Various Artists" whether old or new, for re-issues, remix albums, and for first time issues of older and historic recordings. This isn't part of the BBC Awards, so we are able to tell you the outright winner right now.