Conference Organizers Editing and Proofreading Services

Four hundred abstracts arrive and seventy reviewers score them. The same abstract gets a 2 from one reviewer and a 5 from another, and neither is wrong — they were applying different standards, because the review form asked them to rate originality, significance and clarity on a five-point scale and said nothing about what a 3 looks like.

We edit what conference organisers and programme committees produce — calls for papers and abstracts, review criteria and reviewer guidance, scoring rubrics and their descriptors, submission templates and requirements, acceptance, rejection and revision notifications, programme and session framing documentation, presenter guidance and format requirements, poster and lightning talk instructions, chair and moderator briefings, and delegate-facing programme and abstract book content. Our editors work on the guidance that makes seventy reviewers agree.

Review criteria and their descriptors are what determine whether a conference programme reflects quality or reviewer temperament, and their failure is a scale without anchors. A five-point scale for significance means five different things to five reviewers. We work through these so each criterion has a written descriptor at each point, or at least at 1, 3 and 5, since a reviewer who can read what a 3 looks like will place their judgement rather than their disposition; so the criteria are weighted explicitly with what the weighting means for a borderline abstract, because reviewers otherwise apply their own weighting and a methodologically weak but important abstract gets scored inconsistently; so the guidance says what is not being assessed — the writing quality of a non-native speaker, the author's institution, the topic's fashionability — as these influence scores silently; so the reviewer is told what the conference is trying to build, given that a programme wanting new voices and one wanting established work should produce different scores on the same abstract; so the treatment of incomplete or preliminary work is stated, since many conferences want work in progress and reviewers reflexively penalise it; so a worked example of a scored abstract is provided, as this calibrates faster than any amount of description; and so the discussion route for split scores is defined. Guidance written this way produces a programme the committee can defend.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including submissions, review data and programme material. We are editors rather than programme committee members or academic advisers, and we offer no view on review criteria, scoring or acceptance decisions. What we can do is anchor the scale so seventy people mean the same thing.