Thank you for agreeing to review abstracts for GCMAS. Your efforts in this area are important to the conference as you are providing the first level of peer review for work done by our community. Much of this work will later be published on its own as full journal articles, and as such, will have subsequent review. However, some of it may not be further reviewed, and will be preserved via gcmaspubs.org for future reference, so it’s important to give authors feedback now in case critical edits are needed (more on that in a future post).
To start your review process, you must log in. [Reminder, this is your gcmas2022.org login, NOT your gcmas.org login.] If you have lost your password or are having trouble with this, see this post. Once you’ve logged in, click on “Manage Abstracts.”
Once there, scroll down and click on “Review Abstracts.”
You will then be taken to a modified profile page:
Ignore the stuff at the top, if you see it, and scroll down to the WP Abstracts section. [The alerts at the top are not trivial to remove without breaking some site plugins…]. Once you scroll, you’ll see a list abstracts starting with the most recently submitted. Each abstract has an abstract ID. You will be emailed with a list of abstract IDs which we’d like you to review. You may, in fact, see several emails about this since the WP Abstract system sends out emails when abstracts are assigned, and you may get a summary email from Eric Dugan letting you know the IDs all in one place. You will have between 3-5 abstracts to review.
When you mouse-over the title of an abstract, you will see below the title a context sensitive menu pop-under. Click on “Reviews.”
I’m using a dummy abstract from a couple years back to show how this process works. Next you’ll see:
If you wish to review the abstract, click “Add New” to add a new review.
And here’s where you get to give us your input. About 3/4 of the way down, you will see “Attachments”. By clicking there, you will be able to download the PDF of the abstract. Below that, you can add comments (which we encourage). On the right hand side panel are where you give your final rating.
This abstract system asks for ratings with regards to relevance and quality. You can also suggest type and status. The conference chair has the final say on acceptance or rejection of abstracts.
- With regards to relevance:
- Is the topic original or timely? (If not original, is it an attempt to replicate prior work and do the authors give results in this context?)
- Does the abstract add in a meaningful way to the scientific body of literature?
- Is the topic relevant to its classification at GCMAS or else is the topic of interest to our community?
- With regards to quality:
- Is the question or issue clearly stated?
- Is the significance of the work clearly stated?
- If relevant, are the method, data collection, and analysis procedures well-designed and appropriate to the question addressed?
- Is the abstract clearly written and understandable?
- With regards to formatting:
- Are GCMAS formatting guidelines followed?
- Do references include DOIs where appropriate?
- (If there are formatting problems, we like to contact the authors and ask them to fix them prior to the conference.)
In general, our philosophy has been to classify the better abstracts as podiums, and those that are found wanting to be posters. Some authors have requested to be tutorials, and that should be respected. Abstracts are rejected if there is something egregiously wrong with them. If 2020 and 2021, if an abstract could be updated with minor changes to make it “worthy” we’d suggest them to the author and give them a brief window to make the updates. As such, your comments are worthwhile. If you are a real go-getter, you can even upload more comments:
When you are done, click the blue “Submit” button near the top. You are likely to see a blank page when you do this. Have no fear. Pressing “Submit” will generate a series of emails. I will likely get one, you will get one if your institution permits WordPress emails to get through, and the author will also get an email stating that their work has been reviewed. These emails will have my email address as the reply to email, but will originate from gcmas2022.org, and this may flag your spam filters. I’m working on a fix to this now. You will now receive an update from gcmas2022@gmail.com which does not (hopefully) trigger your spam filter. In the meantime, navigate back to the “Manage Abstracts” page to start over and do another review.
The authors will then, once they login, be able to see updated reviews on their dashboard as shown here.
You can see that there are two brief reviews listed.
As previously noted, you will be assigned 3-5 abstracts to review. While WP Abstracts should keep you out of the other abstracts, I’ve found that I needed to manually update [read: “hack the plugin in”] a number of features for WordPress 5.9 compatibility, so don’t stress test this and stay in your lane. On the plus side, you get to get an early look at what’s been submitted.
At this point, we are asking that you try to have your reviews done by Sunday, February 27th. At this point, we will notify authors of acceptance and ask for presenting authors’ CVs to forward for accreditation. The conference schedule is not likely to be posted for at least another month, so time slots will not be published until then.
If you have any problems or questions about this process, don’t hesitate to contact me (tim.niiler@gmail.com) – especially about the technical issues, or Eric Dugan, our conference chair (eldugan@texaschildrens.org) – especially about content related issues.
Good luck, and happy reviewing!
Tim Niiler