Guidelines & Selection Criteria
To be considered eligible all abstracts must:
- Be unpublished original work and not previously presented before 2011 (material that has been previously presented ONLY at a conference outside Australia will be considered, provided the abstract is not identical to any that has been previously published).
- Be submitted in English.
- Be prepared according to the accompanying information.
The deadline for abstract submission is Thursday 31 March 2011.
When submitting your abstract please ensure:
- It is submitted in MS Word format (If using Vista please save the file as Office 2003 compatible ie .doc).
- It is under the 400 word limit (excluding title).
- It has single line spacing.
- The title is clear, concise and limited to 130 characters.
- There are no paragraph breaks.
- It contains no Microsoft Equation Objects.
- It is text only and does not include images, figures and graphs.
- It is in normal font: no bold, italic or capitalised text.
- It is submitted using the document template downloadable from this webpage below.
- It contains a brief introduction (the purpose of the research), the methodology (explanation on data collection and processing), results and conclusions (discussion and major findings). Please use appropriate headings for these sections.
- The emphasis of the abstract should be on the results and the conclusion. If appropriate, the results and the discussion sections can be combined.
- There should be no references.
- The conclusion is not contrary to the results.
- It represents completed work.
Note: Abstracts shall not be accepted for review by anyone other than the Conference Secretariat. Abstracts which do not meet these requirements will not be accepted.
 Abstract Template Document |
Symposium Template Document |
Important information on submitting a paper
- You must complete the submission process once for each abstract you are submitting for review.
- Identify your submission as a ‘free paper’, a ‘poster’, a ‘workshop’ or as one of a group of papers which are being submitted as a ’symposium’.
- All accepted abstracts will be published in a supplement to the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, December 2011 edition providing registration fees have been paid by 31 August 2011. All presenting authors must be registrants for the full conference and must present original work.
- To be considered for one of the sixteen prestigious Australian Sports Medicine Federation Fellows Awards valued at over $28,000 in total, you must register for the full Conference and be a member of Sports Medicine Australia (SMA). Membership of Sports Medicine Australia is not restricted to Australian nationals.
Click here for a complete list of awards
Submitting Papers for a single symposium session
Each symposium will be 60 or 90 minutes long and should involve one chair (to be nominated) and a series of SHORT papers (8 minutes), which can be followed by a single discussant, a panel discussion, or an interactive discussion with the audience.
Proposals for symposia must include a SEPARATE abstract for each speaker, as well as one abstract which describes the overall aims/objectives/purpose, an outline of the format and content, and a list of contributors. (Hence there will usually be 5-7 separate abstracts as well as the overview). All abstracts must comply with guidelines for abstracts for free papers. When submitting the individual abstracts, please ensure that each member of the group identifies their paper as part of the symposium, by including the symposium title in the appropriate box on the submission form.
Preference will be given to symposia submitted by researchers from different universities, rather than to groups of researchers from the same institute or research group. Individuals cannot be first named author on more than two presentations at the conference – this includes presentations as part of symposia.
The chair and every speaker must register and submit an abstract for his / her presentation.
The deadline for abstract submission is Thursday 31 March 2011. Any abstract received after this date will not be accepted.
Allocation of abstracts to free paper, symposium or poster sessions
- The Conference Committee reserves the right to specify the format via which the presentation is to be made.
- The number of podium, workshop and symposium presentations is limited.
- Individuals will be allowed to present a maximum of TWO oral presentations and TWO posters (workshop and symposium papers count as an oral presentation) at the Conference. Individuals may be named as co-authors on additional papers / posters.
- The presentation type allocated for each paper will be determined by the abstract reviewers and will be based on:
- relationship to theme of the conference
- program constraints
- originality
- topicality and relevance to delegates from a number of disciplines (ie inter-disciplinary work is encouraged).
- Podium presentations must not exceed 10 minutes with 8 minutes for the presentation and 2 minutes for question time. The Session Chair will facilitate the timing of each presentation to ensure that these times are strictly adhered to and that there is opportunity for questions.
- Posters will be presented in a stand alone session.
- Posters must be a maximum of AO in size (Portrait – 0.84 metres wide x 1.18 metres high).
