Abstract management is one of those tasks that appears simpler than it is in practice. The closer one gets to the field, the tougher the process seems. This may be true of perhaps a lot of fields. But abstract management is particularly prone to this kind of underestimation.
Isn’t it just arranging submitted abstract files in a line?
Isn’t it merely then forwarding these papers to reviewers who then spend time and effort analyzing them?Â
Event professionals and managers have the easiest job of the middleman in this process. This is what most people on the outside would like to think. However, the challenges faced by event management professionals are plenty. Anyone who has ever had to coordinate abstracts for a conference will acknowledge the fact that the process is sophisticated, filled with minute details that just cannot be shrugged off.
The majority of problems in abstract management are not random. They follow patterns, and these patterned challenges can most certainly be tracked and cracked down on. In this blog, we’re running you down some of the most common challenges in abstract management as well as how to resolve them effectively.
So, Where Does Abstract Management Usually Go Wrong?
Half of all that goes wrong with your abstract management starts out fairly early. In fact, right from the very beginning. Even before the thought of ‘What can go wrong?’ begins to cross your mind, things begin to go sideways.
It is okay, and it is normal. Particularly for beginners to make mistakes. Even experienced event organizations experimenting with newer formats are prone to making some fundamental mistakes. The moment you hit live on your call for abstracts, the clock begins ticking. If your submission guidelines are vague, you will receive similarly ‘abstract’ submissions. Pun intended.
When you put out an unclear call, all you will be sitting down with at the end of each day are entries that have little to do with your event’s scope. If your event management system is not built for volume, you will spend weeks manually sorting what a well-configured platform could have organized automatically. Many teams do not realize this until they are already buried.
The fix is not incredibly complicated. You can begin by approaching your submission guidelines with the assumption that the person reading them has never submitted to a conference before. Treat everyone as a beginner. In this capacity:
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- Specify word limits
- Spell out required sections
- List exactly which topics fall within your event’s theme and which do not
What About the Quality of Abstract Submissions?
Here is something worth acknowledging openly. Even when your guidelines are clear, abstract quality will still vary. Some submissions will arrive polished and ready. Others will be vague, incomplete, or simply off-topic. This is not a failure of your process. It is a reality of working with a wide pool of researchers at different career stages, in different institutions, and often writing in a second or third language.
What you can do is narrow the gap. Build a checklist into your submission form itself. Ask authors to confirm, before they submit, that their abstract includes a clear objective, a defined methodology, and a stated conclusion. This single step filters out a meaningful proportion of incomplete entries before they ever reach a reviewer.
A sample abstract published alongside your call for submissions does more good than most coordinators expect. Many researchers genuinely want to submit well. They just need a reference point. And if your team has the bandwidth, a light pre-screening pass before submissions enter formal review is worth the effort. Catching clearly unsuitable entries early means your reviewers spend their time on work that actually deserves evaluation.
The Abstract Reviewer’s Side of Things
Getting the right person to review the right abstract is harder than it sounds. Match poorly, and you end up with reviewers assessing work that falls well outside their expertise. Miss a conflict of interest, and you undermine the credibility of your entire review process.
Neither of these is acceptable. Both are avoidable.
Start with a proper onboarding process for reviewers. Collect information about institutional affiliations, existing co-author relationships, and areas where potential bias might exist. Feed that information into your assignment workflow so conflicts are blocked automatically rather than flagged manually after the fact, if they get flagged at all.
Keyword tagging is your friend here. When abstract submitters select topic tags at the time of submission and your reviewer database is organized around the same taxonomy, matching becomes a structured task rather than a guessing game. Free-text descriptions create an inconsistency that someone has to reconcile by hand every single time.
Workload distribution is the other thing to watch. In most teams, the same handful of dependable reviewers end up carrying a disproportionate load. An automated tracking system makes the imbalance visible before it becomes a problem, not after your most reliable reviewers start declining future invitations.
Deadlines and the Communication Problem
A certain percentage of authors will always submit late. That is not pessimism. It is simply how deadline behavior works. What matters herein is if you have optimized your process well enough to reduce this number as much as it is possible. Can you motivate submitters to turn in their abstracts as soon as they can?Â
This is precisely where automated reminders come in. It is up to you and your team to determine the frequency with which you send reminders for your submitters. At the thirty-day, two-week, one-week, and forty-eight-hour marks, the reminders generally make a measurable difference.
Dealing with Late Abstract Submissions
Your organization has to decide upon a concrete abstract submission policy well in advance. All professionals must then be instructed to work in accordance with these regulations to deal with late submissions.
If you plan to accept late entries with a penalty, say so clearly.
If the deadline is firm, maintain it.Â
What creates the most unnecessary work is not a strict policy or a flexible one. In fact, it is an ambiguous one that invites every author with a competing priority to request a personal exception.
Getting the Final Abstract Output Right
This is the stage where poor data management comes back to bite you.
If your submission process collected structured metadata, generating your final output is largely a matter of organization. Author names, affiliations, keywords, and session topics are captured consistently at the point of submission and presented neatly in a program book or a conference mobile app. If that data was collected inconsistently or stored in free-form text fields, someone is going to spend a significant amount of time cleaning it up manually before anything can be published.
Version control is the other thing teams regularly underestimate. Accepted authors request changes after notification. That is normal. What creates problems is not having a clear policy on which changes are permitted or a reliable system for tracking which version of each abstract is the approved final copy. Without that, you will eventually publish something that should not have gone out or fail to publish an update that should have.
Finishing a cycle well is satisfying. But the teams that keep getting better at this are also doing something else.
What Separates Teams That Improve from Those That Repeat Mistakes
After every conference cycle, sit down with your team and document what did not work. Not as a blame exercise. As a resource.
What took longer than expected?
Where did author queries pile up?
Which part of the reviewer process stalled?
The answers to these questions, captured honestly and stored somewhere accessible, become the foundation of a better process next time. An updated workflow document, a revised author guide, and a cleaner rubric. These small improvements compound over successive cycles in ways that eventually make the whole operation look effortless from the outside.
Abstract management will always have challenges. What you can control is how well your systems, policies, and communication hold up under the pressure of a live event cycle. Get those right, and the process stops being something you survive and starts being something you run with confidence.
Run Your Next Abstract Management Conference on Dryfta
Abstract management is demanding enough without fighting your own tools. Dryfta is built specifically for conference and event organizers who need one centralized platform to handle submissions, reviewer assignments, automated author communication, and final output, without the scattered spreadsheets and email chains that slow teams down.
If your current process feels harder than it should be, it probably is. You can simplify it profoundly, should you find the right abstract management tools for your needs. To see what a purpose-built system like Dryfta looks like in action, sign up for a free demo today.