Clinical Nutrition (1994) 13 (Suppl. I): 62-64

0 Longman Group Ltd 1994

How to get your abstract accepted for ESPEN M. J. Rennie, Chairman, ESPEN Scientific Committee

This year’s abstract selection process resulted in the identification of 178 abstracts for oral and poster pre- sentation out of 367 submitted. These are about the usual numbers involved.

The Scientific Committee believes that it would be helpful if prospective authors were more aware of the process by which abstracts were selected in order to help them maximize their chances of success in sub- mission of abstracts for future ESPEN Congresses.

The process of abstract selection

examine the next 20% and accept about half of those. Having decided which abstracts are worthy of selec-

tion (and again, this is done anonymously with abstracts from which the names, country of origin and affiliations of authors have been removed) the Committee makes up the programme in terms of oral and poster presentations. So far as possible the Committee attempts to balance the programme in terms of numbers of oral presentations from a single laboratory or country and takes account of whether or not presentations are likely to be more suitable for oral or poster presentation.

All abstracts are sent to panels for each abstract topic of eight expert referees chosen from the scientific community. These referees are contacted by the local organizers some time before the abstract selection pro- cesses start to make sure that they will be available and able to send the scores for their abstracts back to the local organizing committee in due time for colla- tion of all scores before the abstract selection meeting of the Scientific Committee, which is normally in the third week of May. This gives 6-7 weeks for the abstract selection process. All abstracts are rendered anonymous by the removal of the authors’ names and affiliations. The referees are asked to score the abstract according to the criteria shown on the Abstract Score Sheet (Appendix 1). All reviewers are provided with forms and a description of their task (see below). The scores for each topic are simply aver- aged. Where a reviewer fails to respond the local orga- nizing committee will send out the abstract by fax to members of the Scientific Committee or other suitable experts for review so that for every abstract there will be eight scores. A simple numerical average is taken as the basis of abstract selection.

At the abstract selection meeting the Scientific Committee also chooses Travel Fellowship recipients according to the scores of submitted abstracts, with the proviso that not more than 2 Fellowships be awarded to a single country or to a single laboratory and that the host country for ESPEN Congresses receives no fel- lowships unless there are special geographical diffi- culties for travel within the country (e.g. travel from the North of Ireland to Great Britain).

What makes a good abstract?

The format of the review form has been the subject to much discussion among the officers of ESPEN Scientific and Executive Committees. Whatever we do it is very difficult to make it clearer which abstracts are acceptable and which unacceptable, purely on a numerical basis. There is always a large number of abstracts which fall in the middle. In order to deal with this the Scientific Committee have decided to accept the best scoring 40% without question and then to

First, authors should adhere to the rules which are shown on the back of the abstract form. At present many authors simply ignore these rules and their abstracts are therefore scored low or are disqualified. The major problems are that authors prepare abstracts in the wrong format, i.e. by including graphs or tables with too many elements in them, or they prepare abstracts which contain no objective data. There is a clear instruction that if tables are to be used the table should contain no more than 12 cells of data. Each cell means that a piece of data such as mean f SD or SEM. An example of an acceptable table is printed below.

Table

Pentagastrin dose tmgkg/h) 0.25 0.5 I .o 2.0 4.0 6.0

H+ secretion

(mmolih) 4.1fl.3 26.X3.2 29.6t3.4 35.4f3.5 38.3-t22 40.2f1.7

Pepsin secretion

(w/h) 4.2f1.7 27.4f1.7 29.3-tl.7 35.2f3.7 39.2+1.5 40.0fl.3

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The reason why this rule is rigidly enforced is to make sure that all abstracts can be judged on a com- mon basis and that some abstracts do not score unfairly by having more data.

The other qualities of a good abstract are obvious: authors should say why they did the work (a good way to do this is to express the aim as a question, e.g. does X alter Y?); how they did it (in a manner sufficient to allow a non-specialist to understand the basis of the results); what wasfound (preferably with clear results with units stated, plus means and SE or SD; only give percentage values if the basal value is stated); say why they believe the work supports or discredits some hypothesis or how the result is in some other way important. All authors should present the work in a way in which their conclusion can be supported by objective data and named statistical tests: it is not sufJicient simply to present conclusions without objec- tive data. Even subjects which are less quantitative in nature (e.g. nutritional techniques and formulation) can use quantitative methods to strengthen conclu- sions or recommendations. Abstracts without data are usually rejected out of hand.

The Committee is strongly of the opinion that good abstracts are able to convey an important scientific message with a minimum of information for clarity, so

long as the information is objective, numerical and backs up the conclusions drawn by the authors; thus proper use of statistics is encouraged.

It is not suficient to say ‘treatment X causes vari- able Y to increase (pcO.01)‘. The proper format should be ‘treatment X causes variable Y to increase from WfZ units by A&B% (~~0.01)‘.

Posters

The Scientific and Executive Committees wish to encourage submission of good posters in their own right and to this end they have made available two poster prizes of 400 ECU each.

A new arrangement for poster presentation and the award of prizes was instituted in Antwerp and is a good model which we should follow for the future. Basically, what has to happen is that everyone must put up their poster not later than noon on Monday. The Scientific Committee assess the posters and decide upon poster winners for the basic and clinical cate- gories by Monday evening. Those posters are then taken down and (preferably with the co-operation of the author!) a few slides are made so that the authors can give a 10 minute presentation of their data at a special poster awards session.

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Appendix 1

ESPEN 1995 ABSTRACT SCORE SHEET

Reviewer’s Name: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reviewer’s ID No . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Score the abstracts numerically as: LOW ~1; HIGH =5 except for Category 10 which should be scored LOW = 1; HIGH = 15. If the subject is of no interest to ESPEN (a), is unethetical (b), has no objective data (c) or has to your knowledge previously bsen presented at an international scientific meeting (d) put ‘0’ in Total box; also please check the abstract against the Instruction sheet for abstract preparation and disqualify abstracts (by inserting ‘0’ in Total box) which grossly disregard the instructions (e.g. including big tables or graphs) (e). Please signal the reason by putting a letter (a - e) in the reject box. /VI3 Please give special attention to Category 10 since it will be given extra weighting.

4. Description of what was done (l-5)

5. Suitability of methods to aims (l-5)

6. Are conclusions confirmed by objective 1

results (+stat analysis where appropriate)? (l-5)

7. Scientific value of results (l-5)

8. Potential clinical value of results (l-5)

9. Novelty or originality of the work (even if flawed otherwise) (I-5)

10. Overall impression (l-l 5)

TOTAL (Leave blank)

Poster or Oral recommendation

Reason for rejection (a - e)

P/O

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