Abstract Peer-review Process / Guidelines
The Catalysis Society of South Africa and the organizing committee members of CATSA2022 conference ensure a rigorous, high-quality and unbiased peer review process for all abstracts submitted to the conference. The decision of abstract acceptance will be judged by a panel of expert reviewers and/or session chair and/or conference chairman emphasizing whether the findings and/or conclusions are novel and make useful contributions to the field.
The committee will determine whether the abstract is more appropriate for oral or poster presentation. Eligibility for oral or poster presentation will be determined by the total score (with adjustment for differential scoring behaviour between referees).
The committee operates a single/double-blind peer review process for all the abstracts submitted, where both the reviewer and the author remain anonymous.
The following are the steps that each abstract of CATSA 2022 undergoes during the process of peer review:
- All submitted abstracts are reviewed by internal editorial team to ensure adherence to the conference scope and abstracts which have passed this initial screening are then assigned to the session chair/review committee for evaluation.
- The session chair/review committee decides whether reviews from appropriate independent experts/reviewers are needed to evaluate the abstract. External reviewer(s) evaluate majority of the submissions, but it is up to the session chair/review committee to determine the number of reviews required.
- Once the reviews have been received, the session chair/review committee decides to accept or reject a manuscript, or to request revisions from the author in response to the reviewers’ comments. If the decision is minor revision or major revision, authors will be given 14 days to resubmit the revised abstract.
- Abstracts submitted by invited and/or keynote speakers will be reviewed by conference chairman.
Criteria to be Considered for Scoring
The abstract should be reviewed according to the following criteria:
- Originality of concept/approach and level of innovativeness
- Significance/impact/relevance to conference theme
- Quality of research design/theoretical argument
- Conclusions and interpretations of results
- Presentation style: coherence and clarity of structure
