Several things have changed, done and undone itself in the academic event management space over the years. As a matter of fact, the industry itself has changed in some fundamental ways. Thanks to the advent of technology such as Artificial Intelligence(AI) and data analytics, which have since taken the world by storm. However, even through the changes, abstracts are perhaps one of the few elements that have stood the test of time and remain relevant still.
Even with futuristic tech, the intellectual value of an abstract cannot be undone. That being said, technology has helped transform how we process, classify and review these abstracts.
Academic conferences today depend heavily on quality abstracts to make their events worthy of the time of both their submitters and their audiences. Yet many organizers still choose to handle their submissions manually. While this process is time-consuming, error-prone, it also becomes increasingly unsustainable as the size of your event grows. So much so that in 2026, manually sifting through abstracts for an event of more than 500 submitters is close to impossible.
In this blog, we’re taking you through 10 challenges that come with relying on manual abstract review, as well as how you can rectify them. You’ll know the alternatives that exist and other practical solutions that can make your abstract reviewing a lot easier this year.
1. Manual Abstract Review Requires Tracking Submissions Across Multiple Channels
Researchers submit abstracts by email, Google Forms, or sometimes, even shared documents. Therefore, organizers relying on manual abstract review end up managing spreadsheets, forwarding attachments, and hoping that nothing falls through the cracks. Some submissions arrive with incomplete author information, while others have formatting issues that need correction. A few come in after the deadline, but the timestamp is unclear and makes it difficult to decide whether to accept them.
The fix: A centralized system allows all submissions to arrive in a standardized format, and reviewers can access materials in the same place. This approach reduces confusion and eliminates the need to forward files or update multiple documents manually.
2. Manual Abstract Review Falls Through in Assigning Reviewers Without Creating Conflicts of Interest
Tracking relationships between reviewers and authors manually is nearly impossible, especially as the conference grows. Former advisors, recent collaborators, and institutional colleagues all represent potential conflicts that need careful monitoring. When conflicts get missed, reviews get questioned by authors and program committees.
The fix: A database can track institutional affiliations, co-authorship history, and declared conflicts systematically. Automated systems flag potential issues before assignments go out, which saves organizers from awkward corrections later in the process.
3. Manual Abstract Review Has You Chasing Down Late Reviews
Deadlines pass, and multiple reminder emails go out to reviewers who haven’t responded. Half the reviewers still haven’t submitted their evaluations, so manual checking is required to see who has completed their work and who needs another reminder. Organizers spend valuable time sending individual follow-up messages instead of focusing on other conference planning tasks. The delay pushes back the entire decision timeline and frustrates authors waiting for results.
The fix: Automated reminders go out at intervals that organizers set, such as three days before the deadline, one day before, on the deadline itself, and afterward. A dashboard shows at a glance who has submitted their reviews and who hasn’t, which eliminates the need to maintain separate tracking sheets or send individual follow-ups.
4. Inconsistent Scoring Across Reviewers Makes Manual Review Harder
Some reviewers rate everything between 3 and 4 out of 5, while others use the full scale from 1 to 5. A few write detailed comments but forget to assign numerical scores half the time, which leaves organizers without quantitative data to compare. When comparing abstracts manually, these inconsistencies make it hard to identify the strongest submissions fairly. Organizers end up spending extra time normalizing scores or making subjective judgment calls that may not reflect the true quality of the work.
The fix: Standardized evaluation forms with clear rubrics help reviewers understand what each score means in concrete terms. The system can also normalize scores statistically, which accounts for reviewers who consistently rate high or low compared to their peers.
5. In Manual Review, Losing Track of Workload is Common
Uneven distribution happens easily when assignments are made manually over several days or weeks. Some reviewers end up with seven abstracts while others have only two, but the imbalance doesn’t become obvious until someone sends a frustrated email. Balancing your workload manually means constantly referring back to assignment lists and doing mental math to ensure fairness. This process is tedious and prone to errors that can damage relationships with volunteer reviewers.
The fix: A digital dashboard shows each reviewer’s current workload in real time, so organizers can see immediately if someone is overloaded. Assignments can be redistributed before anyone has to complain, which maintains goodwill and ensures fair distribution of work.
6. Managing Revisions and Resubmissions By Hand
Authors want to update their abstracts after submission, so they email revised versions to the organizers. Now there are two files for the same submission, and organizers need to make sure reviewers see the current version rather than the outdated one. When this scenario gets multiplied by dozens of submissions, version control becomes unmanageable. Organizers waste time matching files to submissions and confirming which version should go to reviewers.
The fix: A submission system allows authors to edit their abstracts up until a date that organizers specify. Reviewers always see the most recent version automatically, and there is never any confusion about which file is current or authoritative.
7. Communicating Decisions Manually and Individually
After acceptance decisions are made, organizers need to send personalized emails to 200 or more authors. Some authors need acceptance messages, others need rejection messages, and still others need invitations to submit posters instead of oral presentations. The process involves copying, pasting, customizing, and sending the same basic message repeatedly. Mistakes are inevitable when handling this volume manually, such as sending the wrong decision to someone or forgetting to include key information about next steps.
The fix: Template-based communication lets organizers send customized messages to groups of authors at once. Accepted authors receive one type of message, rejected authors receive another, and waitlisted authors receive a third option, all with correct details filled in automatically based on their submission status.
8. On Sending Manual Reviewer Feedback to Authors, One By One
All authors want to and have a right to understand why their abstracts were rejected. This is a reasonable request given that many budding researchers use feedback to further their work in the future. Feedback in academia and research is, therefore, nothing short of a fundamental right.
However, manual abstract review threatens the very existence of such a right. This is simply because it may be too overwhelming to send reviews to individual submitters one by one. This is a tedious task that takes hours and hours of meticulous work, for you cannot afford to send the wrong review to the wrong individual. Some authors never receive any feedback because organizers simply run out of time.
The fix: Utilizing a review system can help streamline as well as make the possibility of anonymous reviewer comments true. Reviewers can automatically include authors in decision emails without manual intervention. Authors get the feedback they deserve and organizers don’t need to spend hours copying and pasting comments and removing any identifying details that might give away the individual.
9. Having to Put Together Tedious Reports for Stakeholders
All individuals involved in your conference want you to update them on different things. Conference chairs want to know the acceptance rates by track, sponsors ask for demographic information about accepted presenters and your institutional partners are demanding reports on how the conference is performing in comparison to previous years.
You then have to spend countless hours manually pulling data out from spreadsheets that sometimes just do not work anymore. You’ll have to work with some numbers and calculate percentages whose context you now can’t make sense of and create bar diagrams of incoherent analytics, scratching your head to see how one leads to the other. Producing even one comprehensive report packed with data can take you an entire day and the data may already be outdated by the time your report is complete.
The fix: Built-in analytics help fix this challenge, as it sends reports instantly and whenever one of your stakeholders requests them. Acceptance rates, reviewer activity, submission trends and demographic breakdowns become available for you at only the click of a button and you no longer have to toil on manual data extraction and analysis.
10. Tracking Audit Trails is a Struggle
It is after turning in a finished abstract that the most difficult part of the manual abstract-review process kicks in. More often than not, authors, upon hearing feedback and results, return to your organization to dispute your rejections. It is not uncommon for submitters to claim that reviews were biased or unfair.
It is at this moment that your management is forced to go back down the trail: determine, review the submission, what comments they provided and when the decisions were made, essentially reconstruct the entire timeline again. Add to this, a chain of emails, corrected emails, CCs and spreadsheet notes. Proving that the process was fair becomes challenging when your documentation is scattered across multiple systems and personal inboxes.
The fix: A complete audit trail shows your every action that has been performed on every submission, start to finish. This includes when it arrived, who reviewed it, what scores it received, as well as when decisions were communicated. If any questions do come up later from one of your submitters, as an organizer, you have a clear picture in front of you and have no reason to fret.
The Real Cost of Manual Abstract Review in 2026
The 10 challenges delineated above do not remain within their areas of concern. Rather, they often spill over into several other avenues as well. This then gradually adds up to something much bigger than mere inconvenience for conference organizers. You may be a hard worker who hopes to get everything done by hand. Perhaps you believe that is more efficient than surrendering to and being at the mercy of a system to review your abstracts.
However, the truth is that manual abstract review makes it a lot harder for you to run fair and transparent processes that authors can trust. This directly harms your conference’s reputation in the academic community.
Event Automation is the Sweet New Reality
The good news is that these problems don’t need to be solved one at a time with homegrown solutions that ask for constant maintenance. Modern conference management platforms like that of Dryfta are now capable of handling abstract submission, review and decision-making. Yes, all in one place. These are only a few of the core features that have been in use by our clients for years now. We continue to refine our older features and innovate newer ones as per market demand and customer pain points.
In 2026, we at Dryfta invite you to take a look at how we offer a complete solution for abstract management that will resolve all of the 10 challenges listed in this article and more systematically. Schedule a demo today and discover how much time you could be saving on your next manual abstract review.