Understand the abstract selection process for the 20th EFORT Congress

Issue: November 2018

For each edition of the EFORT Annual Congress, members of the orthopaedics and traumatology (O&T) community all over the world submit about 3,500 abstracts with clinical or experimental results from different levels of scientific knowledge. Thus, no matter at what stage you are in your medical career, you can actively participate to our meeting by having your abstract accepted. After the closure of the online submission, the big challenge for EFORT begins because the best O&T science must be selected to be showcased in the Congress abstract-based sessions.

The great number of abstracts received presents the first challenge. Indeed, as each abstract requires at least three different scorings (at minimum, to obtain a legitimate average score and a standard deviation that allows correct assessment of the scores variability), the number of collaborators needed to perform an appropriate peer-review is equally high. The EFORT Science Committee builds a list of dedicated reviewers by appointing experts in each category, after acknowledgement of outstanding medical and educational experiences. Compiling high-quality presentations that will be on the scientific stage of the Congress is a process that is handled with extreme care and professionalism and thus, depends on a team of reviewers that holds our complete trust.

The review of abstracts submitted for the upcoming 20th EFORT Congress to be held in Lisbon, Portugal 5 to 7 June 2019, will be performed as a blind process, exclusively through our online platform from mid-November to mid-December 2018. Following completion of the scoring of all abstracts, the 24 members of our EFORT Science Committee hold an intense meeting in January to allocate of the best-scored abstracts within sessions.

On Monday 12 November 2018 at 23:59 CET, the abstract submission system will be closed and all abstracts in the system will be allocated to a reviewer with an expertise in the corresponding topic.

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; and
Originality of the work and overall added value they contribute to the current knowledge in the field.

On top of these general principles, several additional criteria are graded on point scales: Problem description; design; control group; materials; methods; results; and conclusions.

Two distinct scoring grids allow reviewers to apply points in a different manner for a same criterion depending on whether the study is either a clinical or an experimental investigation. For this reason, 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 are rated on a distinct scale.

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All review criteria are evaluated independently (for a single abstract, scores can greatly vary from one criterion to another depending on the satisfaction of each) and reviewers base their scores only on the information contained in the abstract (no estimates or projections are possible). The mean score is used as 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 Friday 1 February 2019. 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 2019.

For more information:
20th EFORT Congress in Lisbon | 5 to 7 June 2019
20th EFORT Congress abstract information