Quality Control

Each abstract will be reviewed anonym­ously by at least three experts of the Inter­na­tion­al Sci­entif­ic Com­mit­tee. They will score your abstract using their expert know­ledge and six cat­egor­ies (con­tent, sig­ni­fic­ance, ori­gin­al­ity, rel­ev­ance, present­a­tion and recom­mend­a­tion). Based on their res­ults, your abstract will get between 0 and 10 points and will be clas­si­fied into: accep­ted as an oral present­a­tion (≈ 6 – 10 points), poster present­a­tion (≈ 3.5 – 6 points) or rejec­ted (≈ 0 – 3.5 points). Review­ers have the oppor­tun­ity to over­rule the point-based decision if they think a very good abstract should become a poster or a not-so-good abstract should be improved and presen­ted orally if the sub­ject is of high interest. This can be done through an intern­al com­ment­ing sys­tem.

Before we send out the abstracts to the review­ers, your abstract under­goes a qual­ity con­trol, which is based on the review res­ults of earli­er IMWA con­fer­ences. The qual­ity con­trol checks, for example, the fol­low­ing:

• Is your abstract short­er than 270 words?
• Does your abstract have few­er than 3 para­graphs?
• Did you avoid the word “heavy metals”?
• Did you avoid the expres­sion “ppm” or “ppb”?
• Did you avoid the word “sig­ni­fic­ant” unless you used a stat­ist­ic­al test?
• Did you use the word “impact” unless you mean an “envir­on­ment­al impact”?
• LLMs excess­ively use the terms “sys­tem”, “delve” or “under­score”. Make sure you try to avoid these words wherever pos­sible (e.g. a “ground­wa­ter sys­tem” is an “aquifer”).

As this is an auto­mated pro­cess, you might get a wrong “false” – for which we want to apo­lo­gize. Yet, the large num­ber of abstracts we will receive does not allow us to manu­ally veri­fy each res­ult.