Many annual meetings hosted by specialty societies provide educational credit hours so that attendees may keep current in the field and maintain their professional certifications.
Historically, abstract management was a time-consuming manual process requiring the handling of large amounts of paper and created a considerable administrative workload.
[1] An increasing number of organizations now use web-based abstract management software to streamline and automate the process.
The abstracts are either uploaded as documents (typically Microsoft Word, PDF or LaTeX) or, where graphics and tables are not required, they may simply be entered into the form as plain text.
Following the committee's decisions on which abstracts are to be accepted for the conference the submission software may also be used to collect full papers and PowerPoint presentations.
This often includes an email facility to report reviewers' comments and committee decisions to authors, programme building tools and online publishing.