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Assigning priorities to proposals by SPC

This is an explanation for the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) on how to perform the fourth step of the workflow for the Submission of Proposals for Invited Oral Presentations.

Logging in SPC members will be able to return to the "Call for Abstracts > Review" interface that was already used for proposing Track changes.

It is now necessary to review the abstract again, this time to assign a priority to those abstracts that are meant to be valid invited orals.

To perform the actual review it is necessary to open an abstract and then click on the Review button. Note: if a change of track was already proposed for this abstract, a Change Review button will be present in place of the previous Review one.

For a normal IPAC it is possible to assign a First Priority (i.e., "I strongly support this abstract to be accepted as invited oral") or a Second Priority (i.e., "I also support this abstract to be considered as an invited oral") to an abstract, by way of a Yes/No widget:

At a typical IPAC every SPC member is allowed to cast a maximum of five first priorities and a maximum of five second priorities for each Main Classification. If we consider that we normally have eight Main Classifications (MC1 through MC8) this will allow 80 maximum votes per SPC member (40 first and 40 second priority).

The SPC Chair, however, may choose a different number of possible votes to be cast. The Scientific Secretary will confirm and give precise instructions on how many priorities an SPC member is allowed to assign for a specific IPAC.

After scoring a First or Second Priority, an action must be selected from the pop-up menu:

  • Accept means a suggestion for the SPC to accept this proposal: this should be the normal option at this stage

  • Reject, similarly, suggests not to accept this proposal. For IPAC this should NOT be used unless for very special cases

  • Change track was already done in the previous steps and should NOT be selected now

  • Mark as duplicate also is a special case and rarely used, only if and when the reviewer thinks the proposal is an exact duplicate of another. The exact abstract ID and title are to be entered by way of the popup menu

  • Merge is a request to merge this proposal with another. This should not be used

Since all abstracts should now be in the correct Tracks, SPC members should now go to the Track of their interest and enter their priorities with an Accept review. They should NOT Review/Enter priorities if the abstract is of no interest.

To complete this task please remember to click on the Submit review button.

SPC members should carefully read the reviewing instructions available after pressing the "Review" button before posting their review. Special requirements may be present for each specific IPAC.

Reviewer statistics

When a large number of proposals are to be reviewed it is quite easy to lose track about how many reviews have been made in every track and how many are still available.

The "My Statistics" entry in the Call for Abstracts area of Indico can help.

For every track (group) SPC members will have evidence of the number of proposals they reviewed and how many are still available.

The number of priorities given are also displayed: