Abstract Submission & Review System
Abstract Management Is More Complex Than It Looks — Until You Have the Right System
Running an abstract submission and review process manually is one of the most error-prone tasks in congress management. Submissions arrive by email in different formats. Files go missing. Reviewers are assigned by spreadsheet. Scores come back inconsistently. Someone has to manually tally everything, check for conflicts of interest, notify accepted authors and chase the ones who do not respond.
It is the kind of process where things fall through the gaps — not because of carelessness, but because it is genuinely difficult to manage at volume without a system designed for it.
Our abstract submission and review platform brings structure to every stage of the process. Submitters get a clean, guided online form. Reviewers get a dedicated portal with clear scoring rubrics. Your scientific secretariat gets a real-time view of where every abstract sits. And notifications go out automatically, without anyone having to compose a hundred individual emails.
We have deployed this for medical congresses, research conferences and academic symposia with submission volumes ranging from under a hundred to well over a thousand abstracts.
How the System Works
Configurable Submission Form
Every congress has different submission requirements — topic categories, presentation format preferences, word limits, co-author limits, file attachment requirements, disclosure declarations. We configure the submission form to match your call for abstracts exactly, rather than asking authors to adapt their submission to fit a rigid template.
Required fields, conditional logic (if presenting author is also corresponding author, skip the duplicate field), file upload specifications and custom validation rules are all set up during configuration. Authors submit through a clean, step-by-step form that works on desktop and mobile.
Submitters receive an immediate acknowledgement email on successful submission, and can log back in to review or edit their abstract before the submission deadline.
Submission Tracking & Secretariat Dashboard
Once submissions are open, your scientific secretariat has a live dashboard showing total submissions, breakdown by topic category, presentation format preferences and submission timeline. You can see at a glance whether submissions are trending where you expected, and whether the deadline extension conversation is going to come up.
Individual abstracts can be searched, filtered, flagged and actioned from the dashboard. If a submission is incomplete or has a technical issue, the secretariat can send a targeted follow-up to that specific author without it affecting anyone else.
Reviewer Assignment & Workload Management
Once the submission window closes, the review process begins. Our system handles reviewer assignment at the level of sophistication your scientific committee needs.
Reviewers are invited to register in the system and declare their topic expertise and any conflict-of-interest relationships. Assignment can be managed manually by your scientific secretariat, or the system can suggest assignments based on topic match and workload balance. Each reviewer sees only the abstracts assigned to them.
You control how many abstracts each reviewer is assigned, and can monitor progress — who has completed their reviews, who is overdue and whether the workload is evenly distributed — from the reviewer management dashboard.
Blind Review & Structured Scoring
Author information is stripped from reviewer-facing abstracts where blind review is required. Reviewers score against the criteria your scientific committee defines — originality, methodology, relevance to the congress theme, presentation quality — using a structured rubric that produces comparable scores across the review pool.
Reviewers can add written comments alongside their scores. These comments are used internally by the scientific committee and, where appropriate, shared with authors as feedback.
The system calculates composite scores, highlights score outliers and flags abstracts where reviewer scores diverge significantly — giving the scientific committee the information they need to make consistent decisions.
Conflict of Interest Management
Conflict-of-interest controls are non-negotiable for any credible peer review process. Our system includes built-in mechanisms for reviewers to declare known conflicts during onboarding, and for the secretariat to flag and enforce conflicts identified during the assignment process.
Where a conflict is flagged, the system prevents that reviewer from being assigned to the affected abstract and logs the declaration in the audit trail. For congresses where reviewers and authors come from the same organisations or institutional networks, this is a significant risk management feature.
Scientific Committee Review & Decision Making
After individual reviewer scoring is complete, the scientific committee has a consolidated view of all abstracts with their aggregate scores, reviewer comments and presentation format requests. Abstracts can be sorted, filtered and discussed in the context of the programme structure the committee is building.
Decisions — accepted for oral presentation, accepted for poster, accepted with revision, rejected — are recorded in the system. Where accepted abstracts need to be assigned to specific sessions or tracks, this can be done within the same interface.
Automated Author Notifications
Once decisions are recorded, notifications go out automatically. Accepted authors receive their acceptance letter with presentation details, instructions and deadlines. Authors requiring revisions receive their reviewer comments and a revised submission window. Rejected authors receive a professional notification, with optional feedback where the scientific committee has chosen to share it.
All notification templates are configured with your congress branding and communication tone before the process begins. Where multiple notification rounds are needed — a conditional acceptance followed by a final confirmation — these are set up as a sequence.
Programme Scheduling Integration
Accepted abstracts connect directly to the programme management workflow. Session chairs can be identified, presentation slots assigned and the final programme built from within the same system. Abstract titles, authors and session assignments flow through to the event website, the mobile app and the printed programme without manual re-entry.
Congress Types We Manage Abstract Processes For
Medical & Clinical Congresses
High-volume submissions across multiple clinical subspecialties with strict conflict-of-interest requirements, CPD alignment and structured oral and poster programme builds.
Scientific Research Conferences
Methodologically rigorous review processes with multi-criteria scoring and feedback to authors.
Academic & Interdisciplinary Symposia
Broader topic scope with category-based reviewer assignment and flexible presentation format options.
Professional Association Conferences
Member and non-member submission pathways, often with student paper categories and awards tracks alongside the main programme.
FAQ
A Better Abstract Process Is Better for Your Congress's Reputation
The quality of your review process reflects on the quality of your event. Let us show you how our system works and how it would be configured for your next call for abstracts.