You became an academic conference organizer because you believed in bringing researchers together. You wanted to create spaces where abstract ideas could collide and collaborations could form. You saw yourself shaping programs that would contribute to scaling up a field and subsequently, broader mankind.
However, all you seem to be doing is spending entire evenings simply copying your abstract submission details from emails into spreadsheets. You then wake up at odd hours, worried about if your reviewers ever responded. You’ve sent the same “What’s the status of my abstract?” reply so many times that you could recite it in your sleep.
This is not what organizing a conference is supposed to look or feel like. Somewhere between your first event and now, the administrative burden has grown from manageable to crushing. The number of submissions doubled and then tripled over the years. Authors have now begun expecting nothing but immediate updates and reviewers need their fair share of comprehensive guidance on the process. What worked 5 years ago barely functions today.
But remember that the frustration you feel is not a personal failure. Your process has simply outgrown the tools you’re using to manage it. Here are 11 telling signs that it is about time your abstract management system needs an upgrade:Â
1. You’re Still Using Email and Spreadsheets for Abstract Management
Every submission arrives as a separate email in your inbox. You copy the title into column A and the author name into column B. You paste the abstract text into column C and realize it’s too long to display properly. You adjust the column width and move on to the next email.
This method worked perfectly well when your conference received forty abstracts. Now you’re handling four hundred and the cracks are starting to show. Version control becomes impossible when three different organizers are updating the same spreadsheet. Someone overwrites someone else’s changes and an entire morning’s work disappears.
Your inbox fills with questions from authors who submitted weeks ago but never received confirmation. You know their abstracts are somewhere in the system because you vaguely remember processing them. Finding the specific entry takes longer than you want to admit. Manual processes that once seemed efficient now consume hours that you don’t have.
2. Authors Have No Idea Where Their Abstracts Stand
Graduate students submit their first conference abstracts and check their email the next day. They find nothing. They check again three days later. Still nothing. They wonder if their submissions disappeared into spam folders or got lost somewhere between their computers and yours.
Two weeks pass before they work up the courage to send polite inquiries. You respond immediately because you feel bad about the delay. The parallel is uncomfortable but real. When people submit their work and receive only silence, they start questioning whether the system was designed with them in mind. Authors deserve better than having to chase down basic information about their submissions. They need transparency built into the process rather than granted as a favor when they’re persistent enough to ask for it.
3. Recruiting Abstract Reviewers Feels Like Pulling Teeth
You send out thirty reviewer invitations on Monday morning. By Friday afternoon, five people have responded. Two declined because of scheduling conflicts and three accepted with enthusiasm. That leaves twenty-two people who haven’t replied at all.
You wait another week before sending follow-up emails. A few more responses trickle in, but most of your invitations continue floating in an uncertain state between yes and no. You start reaching out to second-choice reviewers before your first choices have definitively declined. The whole process feels disorganized because it is.
The problem compounds when you can’t easily track who reviewed for you last year or who has expertise in specific topic areas. You send invitations to people who already feel overcommitted because you forgot they reviewed fifteen abstracts last time. You miss opportunities to involve new voices because searching through old records is too time-consuming. Building a strong review panel should be deliberate, but your current system makes it feel random.
4. You Can’t Customize Your Abstract Submission Forms
Your conference focuses on qualitative research methods, but your submission form asks for statistical analyses. Authors leave that field blank or write ‘not applicable‘ hundreds of times. You need information about research ethics approvals, but there’s nowhere on the form to request it.
The mismatch between what you need and what you can collect creates friction at every step. Authors get confused about which fields are actually required for your specific conference. You receive incomplete submissions because the form never prompted people for the right information. Fixing these gaps requires sending clarification emails to dozens of submitters.
Different tracks within your conference have different requirements, but your system can’t accommodate that complexity. Workshop proposals need learning objectives, whereas research presentations need methodology descriptions. Everyone fills out the same generic form and you sort through the resulting mess manually. The rigidity of your current approach wastes time for everyone involved.
5. Tracking Abstract Review Progress Requires Detective Work
The submission deadline passed three weeks ago. Reviews are supposed to be complete in another ten days. You have no idea whether that timeline is realistic because you don’t actually know how many reviews are finished.
You open your spreadsheet and start checking each submission individually. One abstract has two reviews complete and one pending. Another has one review complete and two pending. You continue this process for all your submissions and compile the results into a summary that will be outdated by tomorrow.
This manual tracking consumes an entire afternoon that you could have spent on program planning. You send reminder emails to reviewers who already completed their work because your records weren’t current. You fail to follow up with the ones who are actually behind because they slipped through the gaps in your system. The lack of immediate visibility creates constant anxiety about whether your timeline will hold.
6. Your Abstract Review Process Lacks Standardization
Some reviewers provide detailed three-paragraph evaluations for every abstract they review. Others write single sentences like ‘interesting work’ or ‘needs more focus.’ Both groups are using the same review form but interpreting it completely differently.
Your rating scale runs from one to five, but reviewers don’t agree on what the numbers mean. Some people reserve fives for groundbreaking work and give most abstracts threes. Others distribute fives generously and rarely go below four. Comparing these scores becomes meaningless.
Making final decisions requires converting all of this inconsistent feedback into acceptance or rejection outcomes. You try to account for different reviewer styles and expectations but the process feels subjective. Authors who receive rejections sometimes question whether their abstracts got fair consideration. You can’t blame them when your review system produces such variable results.
7. You Dread the Abstract Notification Phase
Decision day arrives and you face the task of notifying hundreds of authors about the fate of their submissions. You’ve prepared three email templates for acceptances, rejections and waitlist notifications. Now you need to send the right template to each person without making mistakes.
You start the process carefully but fatigue sets in after the first hundred. Your concentration wavers. You paste an acceptance message into an email addressed to a rejected author and catch the error just before hitting send. Your heart races at how close you came to causing real harm.
This manual notification process shouldn’t be so stressful. Authors should receive immediate updates when decisions are made rather than waiting for you to work through a massive email queue. The system should handle the logistics of matching decisions to recipients. You should only get involved in cases that need personal attention.
8. Creating the Conference Program is a Nightmare
You’ve accepted over a hundred presentations across four parallel tracks. Now you need to organize them into coherent sessions with appropriate time allocations. The complexity makes your head hurt.
One session needs presentations on similar topics but two of the best matches are scheduled at the same time. Another session has too many presentations and needs to be split. A third only has a handful of presentations and needs to be combined with something else. Moving pieces around to fix one problem creates two new problems elsewhere.
You spend hours rearranging the program and still aren’t satisfied with the result. A proper scheduling system would flag conflicts and suggest improvements. You could drag presentations between sessions and see the changes update instantly. Instead you’re working with a static document that requires starting over whenever you want to try a different approach.
9. You Have No Historical Data to Work With
Someone asks how your submission numbers compare to last year. You think they increased, but you’re not certain of the exact figures. You dig through old emails trying to reconstruct information that should be readily available.
Questions about acceptance rates, reviewer reliability and submission trends require archaeological expeditions into past records. You can’t easily identify patterns that would help you improve future conferences. Which promotional strategies brought in the most submissions? Which reviewers provided the most helpful feedback? The answers exist somewhere in your scattered files but extracting them takes more time than you have.
This lack of historical perspective means you repeat mistakes that better data would help you avoid. You keep making the same scheduling errors because you can’t see the patterns. Your conference never quite improves as much as it should because you’re always working from incomplete information.
10. Collaboration Among Organizers is Plain Chaos
Five people share responsibility for organizing your conference but coordinating their efforts feels like herding cats. The program chair needs reviewer assignments from the review coordinator. The session organizers need access to accepted abstracts. Everyone keeps asking each other for information that should be centrally available.
Critical details get lost in email threads that branch and multiply. People make decisions based on outdated information because they don’t know that circumstances changed. Someone schedules a session without realizing that three of the presenters have conflicts. These coordination failures create embarrassment and extra work.
The solution shouldn’t need more meetings or longer email chains. A centralized system would give each organizer appropriate access to the information they need. Changes would update instantly for everyone. Communication would happen in context rather than through fragmented conversations.
11. You’re Spending More Time on Logistics Than Strategy
This is the sign that should worry you most. You got involved in conference organizing because you care about advancing your field. You wanted to curate important conversations and create opportunities for meaningful exchange.
Instead you’re answering the same procedural questions over and over. You’re manually tracking reviews when you should be thinking about keynote speakers. You’re fixing scheduling conflicts when you could be designing networking opportunities. The administrative burden has crowded out everything that made this role worthwhile.
When your abstract management process consumes all available time and energy, everyone loses. Authors don’t get the attention they deserve. Reviewers work with inadequate tools. Attendees experience a program that’s merely acceptable rather than exceptional. You burn out trying to compensate for systemic inadequacies through personal effort.
A Better Abstract Management Process in 2026
The frustration you feel about your current process is valid. Academic conferences have grown more demanding and what worked when you were just starting out is no longer what the larger industry expects.
The good news is that you do not have to keep struggling with tools that don’t suffice your goals and ambitions for 2026. Yes, abstract management has just gotten significantly tougher a process to manage but so have service providers like Dryfta.
Dryfta, an online event management platform, has been designed specifically keeping in mind the sophisticated modern abstract management needs. The system can handle abstract submissions, reviewer assignments, decision notifications and program building all in one place.
If you are ready for an abstract management process upgrade in 2026, head to our website and sign up for a free demo today.