Conference organizers who invite abstract submissions for their events know the struggle all too well. With submissions pouring in from across the globe, keeping a close watch on abstracts as they come in is close to impossible. Your team of professionals simply cannot manage to deal with hundreds of abstracts at the same time. They are prone to making errors and missing out on certain pitfalls.
Some of these abstracts come in perfectly formatted and need no further review or consideration. However, there are others that need some substantial cleanup.
It is 2026, but reviewing committees are still complaining about missing information and researchers are still growing frustrated with submission portals that appear more difficult than their research itself. The abstract submission and management have been made unnecessarily complicated.
Challenges may persist, particularly when it comes to hosting a multi-disciplinary event wherein the topics are plenty and interrelated to one another. You have to account for things like terminology and formatting conventions that vary from region to region and across professions. Yet someone must wrangle all these diverse contributions into a coherent review process.
The good news is that simplifying abstract collection does not need miraculous intervention. Smart organizers are finding practical ways to streamline the submission workflow. In this article, we’re giving you some simple solutions to long-standing challenges in the abstract management process.
Create Flexible Abstract Submission Templates
As a first step toward simplification, event planners must build submission templates that are easy to work with for all kinds of people. Your submission portal or website must be able to accommodate different disciplines without growing confusing. This means that you will have to move your event away from the unhelpful ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to forms and towards modular systems. The latter are built to be capable of adapting to the user at hand and their intended submission based on track selection or research category.
To create a smart template design, consider the following steps:
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- Begin by identifying elements that appear to be common across all disciplines. Every abstract needs a title and author information and most require keywords and a brief description. These universal fields form the groundwork of your submission portal.
- Once you have the primary fields sorted, you can turn towards additional field groups that can then be added or removed based on the specific requirements of each track or session type.
- If you are opting to use software to achieve this kind of personalization, ensure that the system allows you to customize these requirements without forcing your researchers through complicated steps.
- Offering clear instructions and progress tabs for submitters along the way makes a world of difference. A lot of problems with regard to abstract submissions stem from confusion as opposed to carelessness. When researchers understand exactly what is expected and why certain information is needed, they provide better quality submissions. Instructions should be discipline-specific where appropriate and written in accessible language rather than administrative jargon.
Make Sure to Streamline the Abstract Review Process
Abstract review often becomes the bottleneck in conference planning. Review committees struggle with inconsistent formats and missing information. They spend more time hunting for basic details than actually evaluating research quality. Some submissions arrive complete, while others lack fundamental components. This inconsistency slows down the entire evaluation process.
Automated validation can catch many issues before submissions reach reviewers. Required fields prevent researchers from submitting incomplete abstracts. Format checkers ensure consistency in fonts and spacing. Manual assignment works for small conferences, but becomes impractical when dealing with hundreds of submissions across multiple disciplines. Intelligent matching systems consider reviewer specializations and capacity limitations while respecting institutional and personal conflicts. Blind review options also help maintain objectivity in evaluation.
A flexible submission platform accommodates these varying preferences without requiring separate systems for different tracks. Review committees can access abstracts in formats that suit their evaluation criteria while maintaining appropriate anonymity levels.
Communicate Effectively With Abstract Submitters
Conference communication often fails because organizers send too many messages or too few. The key here is to make your communications timely and relevant. A researcher who submitted three months before the deadline doesn’t need weekly reminders about the upcoming closure. Someone who started but hasn’t completed their submission benefits from gentle nudges. Review committee members need different information than submitters. Tailoring message content and frequency to specific roles and behaviors improves communication effectiveness dramatically.
International audiences require special consideration. Timezone conversions cause confusion about deadlines. Researchers in Singapore wonder whether ‘midnight EST’ means the start or end of their workday. Displaying deadlines in local time based on the user’s location eliminates this ambiguity. Automated communication workflows can help effectively put a full stop to many of these problems.
Manage Multiple Tracks and Sessions Effectively
Multi-disciplinary conferences typically organize abstracts into tracks or thematic sessions. This categorization helps reviewers focus on relevant submissions and helps attendees find presentations matching their interests. However, managing these divisions often creates administrative headaches.
Allowing organizers to reassign submissions between tracks without disrupting the review process adds necessary flexibility. Sometimes an abstract genuinely fits better in a different category than originally selected. The system should accommodate these adjustments smoothly rather than requiring complicated workarounds that risk losing data or breaking reviewer assignments. Track chairs need visibility into all submissions within their domain and the ability to collaborate with chairs of related tracks when boundary cases arise.
Integrate the Abstracts With Related Systems
Abstract submission doesn’t exist in isolation. It connects to registration systems and conference programs and publication platforms. Researchers who submit abstracts need to register for the conference. Accepted abstracts become sessions in the program. Some submissions may be published in proceedings or special journal issues.
Manual data entry between these various systems creates errors and inefficiency. A researcher’s name gets spelled differently across platforms. Abstract titles change between submission and the final program. Contact information becomes outdated. These inconsistencies frustrate participants and create extra work for organizers who must manually reconcile discrepancies.
Integrated platforms handle information flow automatically. When someone submits an abstract, their author profile populates registration forms. Accepted abstracts flow into program planning tools with all relevant metadata intact. Publication systems can pull final versions directly from the submission platform. This integration eliminates duplicate data entry and reduces the opportunities for errors to creep into the system.
Payment processing deserves special attention in international conferences. Researchers from different countries use various payment methods and currencies. Some institutions require invoices before making payments. Graduate students might need special discount codes. The submission system should accommodate these diverse payment scenarios without requiring organizers to manually track who has paid and who still owes registration fees.
Learn From Past Events in Abstract Management
Every conference leaves you with important lessons that you can use to improve future events.
Which parts of the submission process caused the most support requests?Â
Where did researchers abandon incomplete submissions?Â
What questions came up repeatedly during the review period?
The best submission platforms incorporate these lessons automatically. If many users couldn’t find the abstract word limit, this information becomes more prominent in future iterations. If certain file formats cause upload problems, the system can flag these issues proactively. When researchers frequently ask about blind review status, the submission confirmation email can include this detail explicitly.
Year-over-year comparisons show whether changes actually improved the process.
Did the new template design reduce incomplete submissions?Â
Did earlier deadline reminders increase on-time submission rates?Â
Did the revised instructions decrease support requests?Â
When you measure these outcomes objectively without relying on mere assumptions about what works and what doesn’t, you are moving ahead in the abstract management game.
Simpler Abstract Submissions at Multi-disciplinary Events Today
To manage abstract submissions for multi-disciplinary conferences, one needs to juggle a multitude of tasks. Often, the tasks add up to something much larger and perplexing. Sometimes the tasks are simply beyond human management. The simple steps we’ve underscored in this blog will certainly help you correct some common mistakes and work smarter. However, for large-scale events, human management alone may lead to an immense administrative burden. In such cases, event planners will benefit from switching to event management software that does half of all the work for you.
Automated platforms such as Dryfta will take on perhaps all of the work for you and your team. Our purpose-built event management platform is capable of handling abstract submission and peer review for large-scale conferences. Dryfta has, in the past, also worked with numerous multi-disciplinary events. The events have, in return, also benefited from the flexible templates and intelligent workflow automation offered by the platform.
If you are ready to simplify your abstract management today so that you will never have to worry about overwhelming submissions again, take the first step today. Visit our website and explore Dryfta’s capabilities. Sign up for a demo today, completely free of cost.