Tips on Writing Abstracts for APHA’s Annual Meeting
Even though the Comm
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| Bruce Occena discussing his poster at the 2005 conference | unity Health Planning and Policy Development (CHPPD) section had many sessions, we had to reject lots of really strong and interesting abstracts. Here are some of the things that we took into account.
First of course was the peer review process. Each abstract is reviewed (blind) by three volunteer reviewers. We are grateful to this year’s reviewers and encourage all of you to consider becoming a reviewer for the section. Once the reviews were in, however, we had to choose among the highly rated abstracts. Sometimes there were too many good abstracts on the same topic and we chose the best from among them. Having an original topic or point of view is encouraged, but the topic must fit into the parameters of the section. Some good abstracts were not right for CHPPD and we transferred them to more appropriate sections.
Poster sessions each accommodate 10 presentations, and this means that CHPPD will have 70 poster presentations at the 2008 conference. If you submit your abstract with the choice “oral only,” we will not consider you for a poster presentation and your chances of having the abstract accepted will be reduced.
Finally, the APHA 250 word limit is very brief and requires that you highlight the most important aspects of your work. The final abstract should be succinct, well organized and include original data to the extent possible. Abstracts that are substantially below the word limit suggest that the idea is not fully developed.
By Roy Grant, Chair, Program Committee, rgrant@chfund.org
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