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New review system to better assess work to be introduced for 19th EFORT Congress
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Being an active part of the 19th EFORT Congress in Barcelona is as easy as submitting an abstract. If you have already done so or you are planning to submit your work in the upcoming weeks, then you probably would like to know what happens next.
The EFORT Congress abstract submission is a 2-month period running each year during which about 4,000 pieces of orthopaedics and traumatology (O&T) research are submitted from all over the world. After the closure of this initial process, a challenge arises for EFORT, as the selection of the best O&T science to be showcased in the congress abstract-based sessions needs to be ensured. An accurate and fair abstract scientific review is essential to compile high-quality presentations and must be handled with extreme care and professionalism.
Moreover, the high number of abstracts received represents an equally high need of collaborative experts to perform an appropriate peer-review. Indeed, each abstract requires at least three scorings, which is the minimum required to obtain a legitimate average score and a standard deviation allowing correct assessment of the scores variability, and that quickly increases the number of reviewers that must be involved.
The EFORT Science Committee members carefully select and appoint reviewers in each category, following the acknowledgement of their medical expertise and educational experience. By this means, every year EFORT builds a list of dedicated reviewers who hold our scientific trust.
The process of reviewing abstracts submitted for the upcoming 19th EFORT Congress to be held in Barcelona, from 30 May to 1 June 2018, will be exclusively performed through our online platform from mid-November to mid-December 2017, allowing the Science Committee to meet in January for allocation of the best scored abstracts within sessions.
On 12 November 2017 at 23:59 CET, the abstract submission system will be closed. At this time, all abstracts in the system will be considered as final submissions and allocated for review. Abstracts then will be analyzed for different standards of quality: scientific and clinical value; relevance to the O&T community’s needs; suitability of methods to aims; confirmation of conclusions by results; objectivity of statements; originality of the work and overall added value for the current knowledge in the field.
On top of these general principles, the following review criteria are graded on point scales: problem description; design; control group; materials; methods; results and conclusions. The scoring grids with the point scales to apply vary depending on the main section of the abstract, making possible the attribution of a different amount of points for the same criterion for either a clinical or an experimental study. By this means, all criteria are weighted differently by several adding or subtracting possibilities (objective criteria have more weight in the total score than subjective criteria) and the influence of the scientific background of each abstract is reflected in the overall evaluation. Animal experiments or anatomy/biomechanics studies also have a distinct scale to fully justify each criterion scored.
All review criteria are evaluated independently (for a same abstract, scores can greatly vary from one criterion to another depending on satisfaction of each) and reviewers base their scores only on the information contained in the abstract (no estimates or projections from data available).
The whole process is performed in a blind-fashion by a given number of orthopaedic surgeons in the relevant subspecialty and the mean score is used in determining the cut-off point for acceptance. All authors and co-authors will be notified by email about the acceptance status of their submitted abstract(s) on Thursday, 1 February 2018. The presenting author of a selected abstract must undertake to attend the Congress and present the abstract in the session and at the time designated by the EFORT Science Committee. For further details on registration fees and attendance, please consult our registration platform as of January 2018.
- For more information:
- 19th EFORT Congress in Barcelona | 30 May-1 June 2018
- 19th EFORT Congress Abstract Information