Abstract Review
Each abstract will undergo a double-blind review process by 3 reviewers from the International Scientific Committee. Before the abstracts are visible to the reviewers, each abstract will be quality-checked. This quality check will verify the length of the abstract, the number of paragraphs and the use of several keywords that might be considered unscientific or should not be used any more (e.g. heavy metals, ppm/ppb for liquids, impact, significant for non-statistical use). These criteria are based on the experience of past IMWA conferences, where abstracts that didn’t meet these criteria were more often scored lower than others.
Each reviewer can choose one of these categories and provide an overall recommendation:
Strong Oral – “must have” – 100 Points
Moderate Oral – “ok but not great” – 90 Points
Weak Oral – “barely acceptable” – 60 Points
Poster – “interesting, but don’t want to listen” – 40 Points
Reject – “very badly prepared paper” – 0 Points
The final score is calculated using the average of the reviews divided by 10, which results in 0 to 10 points. Usually, abstracts with less than 4 points will be rejected (about 3 % of all abstracts), abstracts between 4 and 6 points will become posters (19 %) and abstracts above 6 points will be accepted as oral presentations (78 %). Reviewers have the opportunity to overrule the point-based-decision if they think a very good abstract should become a poster or a not so good abstract should be improved and presented orally if the subject is of high interest. This can be done through an internal commenting system.
After the review process, we will inform you about the reviewer’s decisions and send you their “comments to the authors”.
Full Paper Review
In general, abstracts accepted as oral presentations need to provide a 6 pages full paper which will be published in the proceedings volume and needs to follow the “Mine Water and the Environment” criteria for writing papers. Only authors who paid in full and provided a full paper will get an oral slot during the conference. Poster presentations will get the opportunity to provide also a 6 pages full paper which will be published in the proceedings volume.
Each paper will be reviewed by two reviewers, and authors get the opportunity to correct their papers according to the reviewers’ comments. The names of the reviewers will not be revealed to the authors. After the review comments are included, the paper will usually be accepted for publication in the IMWA 2025 proceedings volume. It will not be published or accepted for presentation if the quality criteria of IMWA Conferences are not met.