Each abstract will be reviewed anonymously by three experts of the International Scientific Committee. They will score your abstract by using their expert knowledge and six categories (content, significance, originality, relevance, presentation and recommendation). Based on their results, your abstract will get between 0 and 10 points and will be classified into: accepted as oral presentation (≈ 6 – 10 points), poster presentation (≈ 3.5 – 6 points) or rejected (≈ 0 – 3.5 points). Reviewers have the opportunity to overrule the point-based-decision if they think a very good abstract should become a poster or a not so good abstract should be improved and presented orally if the subject is of high interest. This can be done through an internal commenting system.
Before we send out the abstracts to the reviewers, your abstract undergoes a quality control, which is based on the review results of earlier IMWA conferences. The quality control checks the following:
- Is your abstract shorter than 270 words?
- Has your abstract less than 3 paragraphs?
- Did you avoid the word “heavy metals”?
- Did you avoid the expression “ppm” or “ppb”?
- Did you avoid the word “significant” unless you used a statistical test?
- Did you use the word “impact” unless you mean an “environmental impact”?
As this is an automated process, and you might get a wrong “false” – for which we want to apologize. Yet, the large number of abstracts we will receive does not allow us to manually verify each result.