Abstract Reveiws

I agreed to review conference abstracts for a conference I’m not going to as a way to stay current with what’s new and hot in my field.  When I signed up, they said that there would be maybe two dozen abstracts each person would have to review, which is a lot, but doable.  When I got the assignment, however, there were more than 40 abstracts to review!  Even worse, I listed one of my areas of expertise as (roughly) “combining two or more techniques,”  which is a good description of my primary research interests, but I didn’t consider in terms of abstracts that means the topics I’m assigned are “combining ANY two or more techniques for ANY reason.”  I have yet to come across an abstract that I feel completely unqualified to review, but some have been in fields I only know through coursework.  I feel like I am learning more from reviewing these abstracts than I would by going to the conference.

After reading several abstracts, it’s clear what impresses me: statistics or quantitative data, figures, and references (though the references are mostly a proxy for placing the work in a larger context).  Some people didn’t take the abstract submission very seriously and they say almost verbatim: “we took some data, analyzed it, and found a result.”  I haven’t decided if those are in the reject pile yet: they are certainly “not even wrong,” so is the reject line at being wrong or being too vague to tell if they are wrong?