Assignment and review are one act in Rostrum: giving an abstract to a reviewer creates the empty review they will fill in. There are no rounds and no resubmission — an abstract is judged once, by everyone assigned to it.
Building the reviewer pool
Add people to the event's reviewer pool from the Abstracts tab. Being in the pool is bookkeeping only — it grants nothing and sends nothing. Reviewers become reviewers when work is assigned to them.
Tag each reviewer with the tracks they are qualified for. Tags are what make automatic assignment sensible: a cardiology abstract goes to reviewers tagged for cardiology before it goes to anyone else.
Three ways to assign
The moment the first reviewer is assigned, the submitter can no longer edit — regardless of the "allow editing after submit" setting. This keeps every reviewer looking at the same text.
The consequence: if you switch on automatic assignment on submit and allow post-submission editing, submitters lose their editing window instantly. Choose one.
The one exception is a revision round: asking for changes deliberately punches through the lock, because the committee has just asked for the content to move. The lock re-engages the moment the abstract is resubmitted.
Conflicts of interest
A reviewer who opens an abstract and recognizes a conflict declares it with a reason. This:
- marks the review as conflicted and clears any partial answers;
- keeps the record as an audit trail — you can see who declared what, and why;
- permanently excludes that pairing. The abstract will never be offered back to that reviewer, by any assignment mode.
Your progress view shows conflicts as gaps to fill, so you can top up the missing coverage.
The reviewer's experience
Reviewer A reviewer signs in to the hub with an emailed code and sees a queue of everything awaiting them across every event. Abstract reviews are scored inline, without leaving the queue.
Each review asks for two things:
- The scoring questionnaire — the rating scales and questions you configured.
- A recommendation — Oral, Poster or Reject on an individual abstract; simply Accept or Reject on a session proposal, where the format is the chair's proposition rather than the reviewer's. This sits outside the questionnaire and is always required, so every completed review carries a clear verdict even when the questionnaire is all free text.
They may also write comments to the author, which you can choose to forward with the decision, and committee notes, which never leave staff under any circumstances.
Reviewing a session proposal shows the session description and then each talk in turn with its own authors, judged as one unit. Where supporting files are allowed and permitted under your blind setting, they appear alongside the abstract for reading and download.
Reviewing a resubmission
While an abstract is out for revision it leaves the reviewer queue entirely — nobody is asked to score a version that is being rewritten, and its files are unavailable in the interim. When it comes back, the reviewers you chose get it again, and the scoring screen marks which sections changed and offers the previous version alongside.
If you kept the same reviewers, their earlier answers and comments are still there as a starting point rather than a blank form.
Only rating questions produce a score, and each rating is converted to a percentage of its own maximum before averaging. A question scored out of ten therefore cannot outweigh one scored out of five. Yes/no and multiple-choice answers are reported as counts, never silently turned into numbers, and free text is shown as written.
A questionnaire with no rating questions is perfectly valid — the board then ranks by the reviewers' recommendations instead, and says so.
Keeping reviewers moving
Assignments carry a deadline. Rostrum emails reviewers when work is assigned and again as the deadline approaches, on the schedule you set. The progress and workload views show who has finished, who has not started, and how the load is distributed — useful before you assign another hundred abstracts to the same three people.