Instructions for the submission of abstracts
Here you will be instructed, which formal requierements are needed for the papers you may want to hand in for the conference.
We will use our online portal that will help us to standardize all abstracts and prepare the abstract book more efficiently. Many international conferences and journals have similar portals, so this will give you the chance to practice this type of submission.
Who needs to submit an abstract?
All doctoral students of the GGL are expected to prepare a presentation for the 8th GGL Annual Conference. Each GGL research section will be allotted time for oral presentations depending on its size. You will agree with your section speaker which members will give an oral presentation. All other section members should present a poster during the conference. For both types of presentations, please use the guidelines and template below.
Submission Deadline: 02 July 2018
General considerations
When writing your abstract and preparing your presentation, please keep in mind that you will present to listeners who come from many different disciplines and might not be aware of the conventions within your own field of research. Therefore, a concise and clear abstract is required. The abstract should briefly state the purpose of the research, methods adopted, the principal results and major conclusions. Non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract. The maximum length of the abstract is limited to 300 words.
We advise you to prepare the abstract as a Word or other text document first. Make all corrections and agreements together with your supervisor. Once you have completed this step, you can then copy and paste the text into the online portal. Use the word count function in order to make sure that your text is not too long since you will not be able to submit if your text exceeds 300 words.
The online form works best with Firefox or Chrome. Please do not use Internet Explorer (you might not be able to submit your abstract)!
For all of your writing, please use British spelling. For a quick reference on the differences between British and American spelling, please see this article from the Oxford Dictionary.
Title of your abstract
Please find a short and interesting title and avoid abbreviations. The title does not need to circumscribe the whole content of your doctoral project.
Authors
The list of authors should start with the presenting author, followed by the co-authors. Usually your first supervisor should be the last author listed. All abstracts have to be agreed upon and checked by the supervisors. All authors that are listed in the abstract must have approved it before it is submitted. Please refrain from adding any honorary authors!
Affiliation
You will find a drop-down list of possible institutions (based on the institutions from 2014). You can choose from that list, make corrections to a chosen institution as well as type in a new one (uncheck the box). Please make sure that you enter the name of your institute in English. If there is more than one institution, you will be able to enter these institutions in a numbered list and you need to assign the correct number for each author.
Presentation
You may indicate whether you wish to present a poster or talk. If you already know that you want to give a talk, please indicate that here.
Abstract
Our portal will do most of the required formatting for you. For that reason, you will not be able to copy and paste pre-formatted text. After entering your text during the upload, you will then be able to format words as italics, subscripts or superscripts.
For the same reasons, please do not enter sub headings such as: methods, results and so on. To start new paragraphs you may enter single line breaks, but it is not absolutely necessary. If the space for your abstract is exceeded because of too many line breaks, you will not be able to submit it. Bulleted or numbered lists should be avoided as well.
You will have the opportunity to use special characters such as Ω, ψ etc. through a button on top of the frame which you will use to enter your text. If you need to use characters or symbols not listed there, please e-Mail Office@ggl.uni-giessen.de.
References (Optional)
References should be avoided or restricted to those absolutely necessary for the comprehension of the abstract. Each of the references must be cited in the text and marked by numbers in brackets e.g. [2]. A maximum of 3 references are allowed.
When entering details of the references, please do not use dots, commas, colons etc. For the title of the journal, please use the abbreviated version of the title such as "N Engl J Med" or "J Org Chem". A list of major journals and their abbreviations is available from Web of Knowledge here.
When entering the authors of the references you only need the initials of the authors first names. Papers with more than two authors will be shown as "Miller et. al", so you only need to enter the first author if your paper has more than two.
When entering the page numbers please write both full numbers with a dash, e.g. 234-239 (not 234 - 9).
Submit, preview and confirm
After you have submitted you will have the possibility to review the content of your abstract and see a basic preview. Please use this view to check whether all of the information is complete, and specifically that you did not forget any of the information required for the authors or references.
If you see anything that needs to be changed, you can then return to the portal and make the corrections. If you click on confirm, your abstract will be uploaded and you cannot change it anymore.
We wish you good luck with the preparation of the abstract!