Submission FAQs

Think of your abstract as a combination of a trailer and executive summary of your talk or poster.

Below are some helpful hints:

• Clearly describe the object(s) being treated or the research or project undertaken. Be as specific as possible. Use plain English, limit jargon, and write for a general audience. Use the comments box to add information not captured in the form.
• Contextualize the importance of the object(s) or project concisely. Why would it be important for the audience to hear this talk?  This section of the abstract is VERY important as you are essentially trying to sell your abstract to reviewers.
• Concisely describe the methodology. What techniques were used? What did the treatment/project/research entail?
• Summarize the results
• State the principal conclusions and/or findings.

For more information see our guide titled, “Tips for Writing an Effective AIC Annual Meeting Abstract,” also available in Spanish and Arabic.

When submitting your abstract, you will be able to choose three sessions where you think it will fit best. Decide which of the many sessions option are your first, second, and third choice.

Here are your options:

• Opening General session talks are all-attendee talks that set the tone for the entire meeting.  They are 15 minutes long. If you submit an abstract to the Opening General Session, we will automatically consider it for the Concurrent General Session as well. If you are interested in submitting to any of the General Session, you will need to select the session as your first choice.
  
  
• Concurrent general session talks are sets of themed talks that are usually 20 minutes long, but some organizers may choose to have shorter talks and/or panels. If you submit an abstract to the Opening General Session, we will automatically consider it for the Concurrent General Session as well. Because the Concurrent General Sessions are themed, you will need to select a particular themed session as your first choice.
  
  
• Specialty and Network Session talks are often 20 minutes long. Depending on session organizers, they may choose to offer shorter talks or involve a panel discussion. If you submit an abstract to a joint session, we will also consider it for individual specialty sessions. For example, if you submit to the Paintings and Wooden Artifacts Session, your abstract will be reviewed for the joint session, but also the Paintings Session and the Wooden Artifacts session. We will consider your abstracts only for a specialty session if you select a specialty session for all three choices.
  
  
• Posters – If you are interested in giving a talk but would also consider presenting your research as a poster, please select poster as your third choice. This will allow the review committees for the talk-based sessions to review your abstract first. If your research is best displayed as a poster and you only want to be considered for a poster, please select posters for all three of your choices.  Some specialty groups may choose to offer lightning poster rounds where authors are invited to give a brief presentation of their work. If you would like your poster to be considered for this, please check the appropriate box during the submission process.

An author, whether of oral presentations or posters, is anyone who has contributed to the work through:

1. Scholarship – an author should make substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work. This could include the conception, design, analysis and/or interpretation of data. Anyone who meets qualification 1 should have the opportunity to participate in actions 2-4. However, these later criteria should not be used as a tool to disqualify individuals from being an author.
2. Authorship - all authors should play a role in the drafting and/or revision of a presentation or poster.
3. Review and Approval - all authors must approve that their contributions are accurately noted and be satisfied with the quality of description of their portion of the work.
4. Responsibility - all authors are responsible, to the best of their ability, for the integrity and accuracy of their work

If you could not have done the work by yourself, chances are you should have a co-author.  For more information, please see our guide titled “Authorship and the AIC Annual Meeting Presentations and Posters.” It is available in English, Spanish and Arabic.

We take the ethics surrounding authorship very seriously, and there are very few circumstances where an individual should submit an abstract without notifying their co-authors and getting their formal approval.  If there is a severe extenuating circumstance such as a medical emergency, please contact our Meetings and Advocacy Director, Ruth Seyler, at rseyler@culturalheritage.org and Vice President Cory Rogge at crogge@menil.org to discuss this situation.

You can add up to 10 co-authors. Use the drop-down menu to indicate their role. We realize many papers may evolve between abstract submission in September and the Annual Meeting in May, so you can update your list of authors by emailing our Meetings and Advocacy Director, Ruth Seyler, at rseyler@culturalheritage.org. In the interests of staff time, we ask that you make authorship changes no later than 30 days before the start of the meeting.

Abstracts for both talks and posters are due September 16.  We suggest not waiting till the last minute to submit them as significant web traffic on the submission portal can sometimes cause delays and frustrations. It is also helpful to review the form and the questions asked before starting to work on your abstract. We will consider late abstracts only on a case-by-case basis.

You must submit through our online submission site, which you can find links to on our Call for Submissions page. The site will not recognize your AIC login, so if this is your first submission, you will have to set up a new account. Make sure to give yourself time to do this before submitting. You can use the same credentials as your AIC login to make it easier.

You do not need to be an AIC member to submit an abstract. We welcome submissions from conservation professionals and professionals from related fields at any experience level.

Our goal is to make our annual conference a place where attendees hear from a diversity of individuals and discuss discuss a variety topics, which is why we ask you to limit the number of abstracts you submit.  Presenters rarely give more than one talk at a meeting, and we also restrict the number of posters a person may present.  We strongly recommend quality over quantity, so the maximum number of abstracts we will review from one presenting author is 3. We do not limit the number of abstracts on which someone is a co-author.

Please keep the body of the abstract under 500 words.

In additional to the title and body of the abstract, you will need to provide the name, job title, biography, and email address for every presenter and co-author.

Yes, you can make changes to your finalized abstracts until the deadline of September 16. After this deadline, the review period opens and you can no longer edit your abstract. If you realize that you have made a major error after the deadline, please contact the Meetings and Advocacy Director Ruth Seyler, rseyler@culturalheritage.org. We can only fix major issues that involve a missing or incorrect piece of information.  If we select your abstract for our program, you will have an an additional opportunity to edit it before we publish it.

Wide member participation in the abstract review process for all sessions is essential for creating a successful program. A number of committees (comprised of our members) review submitted abstracts.

Specialty Sessions, including the Collection Care Session, usually have review committees comprised of the elected officers of a particular specialty group and chaired by the group’s program chair.

General, Poster, and Pre-sessions each have their own committees.  The board's vice president chairs these committees and serves as overall program chair for the meeting’s plenary (all-attendee/non-specialty) sessions. The vice president appoints members to serve on these committees with the aim of representing a diversity of approaches and expertise within the conservation field.

Committee members read each abstract, discuss its merits, and consider its potential place in the final program using the Review Criteria below.

Relevance/Significance of Topic

• Is the subject matter new or innovative?
• Does the paper/poster demonstrate creative problem-solving, important information of use to the field, or include informative case studies?
• Does the subject matter focus on the art/culture of underrepresented groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or PWD)?
• Is the project especially relevant for a local, regional, or national community?
• Does it involve diverse stakeholders or focus on community collaboration?
• Does the topic represent an opposing point of view, or a viewpoint not often considered in conservation?
• Is the topic in keeping with the theme of the meeting?
• Has the author published this work or presented a similar paper at other conferences? (We prefer new work that has not been presented previously.)

Purpose/Hypothesis/Outcomes

• Is the purpose of the presentation or hypothesis of the research clearly stated? 
• For research yet to be completed, will the outcomes be useful regardless of results?
• Is the author list appropriate? (E.g. If scientific analysis forms the basis of the talk, is the scientist listed as an author? If the work is community-based or –focused does the author list include key community collaborators?)

Writing

• Is the content of the paper communicated adequately and clearly in the abstract?
• Do ideas flow logically and are appropriate terms used? (Some variation is expected and acceptable, especially when reviewing abstracts from non-native English speakers or that reflect regional dialects.)
• Is the title descriptive of the content? Will it attract attendees? (We can suggest changes to improve the title.)

We will send your abstract to the review committee for your first-choice session. They will either accept it or will pass on to the review committee for your second choice.  If not selected in this second round, we will send your abstract to the review committee for your third choice.

Many review committees will select their talks in the first round and not accept anything during the second or third review rounds. For example, if you submit an abstract to the General Session as your first choice, and it isn’t a good match for the meeting theme, you may have limited your chances of getting your abstract accepted, because the selection committee of your second choice may have already accepted a full slate of talks by the time it comes to them for review. Therefore, your first-choice matters!

Sometimes a review committee for a session that you did not have as one of your three choices will want to accept your abstract for their session, so it is possible that we will accept your abstract even when the review committees for your top three choices decline to take it.

Once all rounds are complete, we notify authors about whether their abstract has been accepted (and for which session) or declined for this year. In general, we receive many more abstracts than we can accommodate in the final program. While deliberations of each review committee are strictly confidential, authors may request further information from the meetings director in the case of rejected submissions. 

If we accept your submission into a session, but you are no longer interested in presenting, you may decline to present it.

Yes, we hold our annual conference onsite in a particular city each year with a online access option for attendees only. We expect speakers to register (at a reduced rate) and attend the meeting onsite. If there is a reason why you can’t present in-person, please list it in the appropriate place on the form. 

We have a couple of grants that provide limited financial support for speakers and attendees.  See our Grants and Scholarships page for a list.