Overview
Abstracts
The Abstracts section manages the scientific abstract submission and peer review process. There are four separate access levels, each showing a different view.
Access levels
| Policy | View |
|---|---|
| Abstracts - Reviewer | Shows only the submissions you are assigned to review |
| Abstracts - Admin | Shows all submissions from all authors with full management controls, and the Reviewers monitoring page |
| Abstracts - Metrics | Shows aggregate submission statistics only |
Submission lifecycle
Submitted → Pending Review → Reviewed → Invited / Accepted / Rejected / Waiting List
Abstracts begin in Submitted status when an author completes their submission. Reviewers then score them. Once enough reviews have been collected (defined by the congress's required_reviewers setting), the submission is considered Reviewed. An administrator then sets the final status.
Submission fields
Each abstract submission collects:
- Category — the scientific topic area
- Title — the abstract title (up to 150 characters)
- Abstract body — the full abstract text (up to 250 characters)
- Authors — one or more authors, each with a title, name, and institution. The first author is treated as the presenter.
- Keywords — 3 to 5 keywords describing the abstract, entered as tags
- Figures — up to 3 supporting images (2 MB max each), each with a reference label (e.g. "Figure 1", "Figure 2a")
- Conflict of interest declaration — whether the authors have a conflict of interest to declare, and a free-text disclosure if so
Both the admin and reviewer views display the conflict of interest declaration as a read-only field on the submission.
Review scoring
Congresses can score abstracts in one of two ways:
- Flat scale (default) — reviewers give a single score from 0 to 5
- Custom grading system — congress admins define one or more scoring criteria (e.g. "Scientific Merit", "Originality"), and reviewers pick a rating for each criterion from a shared scale (e.g. "Excellent", "Good", "Poor")
See Reviewing Abstracts for how scoring appears to reviewers, and Admin View for how scores are aggregated and displayed.
For every submission, the system tracks:
- How many reviewers have scored it
- Each reviewer's individual score (and, with a custom grading system, their per-criterion breakdown)
- The average score across all reviewers