At scientific events such as congresses, symposiums, seminars, and academic conferences, it is common to publish scientific papers.
This part of the event can turn into chaos if you don’t make the best decision when choosing which paper evaluation tools to use.
An ideal system should avoid manual work, which can become critical and compromise the deadlines defined in the event’s schedule, generating dissatisfaction among participants.
10 Features of Ideal Evaluation Tools
For an event expecting more than 100 scientific papers, a solution that facilitates the entire evaluation process becomes essential — from submission, evaluation, and results disclosure to making the proceedings available.
When choosing your evaluation solution, make sure participants, reviewers, and organizers can carry out their activities without problems.
Beyond the basics, some features are essential to speed up the entire submission and evaluation process for scientific papers.
1. Simplicity and Agility
This is a critical point. Everyone should adapt to a new solution with the smallest possible learning curve, without needing manuals.
Activities must be clear and intuitive for everyone — participants, reviewers, and organizers.
Agility is also key. Especially for events with a high number of scientific papers, submissions should use simple forms, with clear submission rules for participants.
A dynamic evaluation area also helps reviewers speed up their assessments without getting lost in emails and thousands of files.
Evaluation Schedule
Find out whether your evaluation schedule can be shortened. Track every indicator and make decisions based on facts.
2. Data Integrity
All evaluations and information recorded about scientific papers must be stored with full integrity.
This prevents changes outside the deadline or manual interventions without notifying all parties involved.
The evaluation process must be transparent to everyone and followed rigorously to maintain the event’s credibility with participants.
3. Traceability of Information
Every action related to the papers should be logged and made available to the scientific and organizing committee.
A history with date and author of each action is recorded, which is essential for events with more than one person on the committee, so each member’s actions can be tracked.
4. Simple, Practical Submission for Participants and Reviewers
Paper submission can become a bottleneck for your event if the submission form isn’t simple for participants, generating doubts and extra support requests.
Papers should also be automatically available to reviewers in the relevant thematic areas and paper category, without needing to be forwarded by email or attachment — speeding up the whole process so the evaluation deadline isn’t missed.
Invitations
Invite reviewers with just one click, suggest or let them choose their categories and thematic areas. Invitations grant access to the restricted evaluation area.
5. Practical Evaluation for Reviewers
Reviewers should have easy access to paper evaluation and a simple way to submit their opinion.
They are often doing volunteer work for the event, so the process should be made easier.
It should be very clear which papers still need to be evaluated and what the evaluation deadline is, so reviewers can plan ahead and avoid delaying the results schedule.
Blind Peer Review
Blind peer review, according to research by Sense About Science, is considered the fairest form of evaluation by 84% of respondents. So look for a tool that makes it easy to implement this evaluation method.
6. Easy, Fast Distribution of Papers to Reviewers
There’s nothing better than automating manual processes to make our lives easier.
Among paper evaluation tools, a good system should automatically balance reviewers’ workload.
It should distribute papers to be evaluated while also avoiding conflicts of interest, so reviewers never evaluate papers they authored themselves.
Automatic Distribution
Papers are distributed automatically according to category, thematic area, and several other factors such as performance, speed, and conflict of interest.
7. Fast Release of Results
Given a tight schedule and many activities to carry out, nothing beats making life easier for whoever needs to release the scientific papers’ results.
This lets you notify all authors by email with just one click, while also offering the flexibility to release the result of a single paper for those exceptional cases that occasionally come up.
8. Fine Adjustments
Look for a tool that gives you the freedom to make various adjustments, such as:
- Define how many reviews are required to approve a paper.
- Make fine adjustments to the distribution.
- Add and remove reviewers for each paper to speed up the process.
9. Fast Reviews
The reviewer’s area is where evaluators submit their reviews quickly and easily — they have access to a dedicated area for this purpose.
10. Easy Generation of Event Proceedings
Another manual task that can be sped up by a scientific paper system is generating the proceedings with all the event’s approved papers.
Instead of handling each paper individually, it’s much better to simply define a file format and let the whole job of compiling all the papers happen automatically.
In the end, a beautiful site with the publications and catalog record should be made available, like in this example from the PIBIDSUL event.
Ensure the quality and integrity of your papers. Put an end to email-based evaluations and make your event more professional with a great evaluation system that saves time and patience.
