Guidelines for Early Career Abstract Submissions

The ASLMS encourages involvement of all early career scientists and clinicians. Early career individuals should submit their abstract to a main session category and will have the opportunity to designate if they would like their abstract to be considered for oral presentation, ePoster, or either of those two options.

Definition of "Early Career"

"Early career" = Undergraduate students, graduate students, residents, interns, fellows-in-training, post-doctoral fellows, and associates up to 10 years postgraduate.

Submission Process

Early career submitters must submit their abstracts to a main presentation category (Basic Science and Translational Research or Clinical Applications) and indicate "YES" that the presenter qualifies for Early Career.

NOTE - Some early career presenting authors may also qualify for an ASLMS Abstract Presenting Author Scholarship to support attendance at the Annual Conference. Please see the Abstract Presenting Author Scholarship page for application details and deadlines. Scholarship applicants must be listed as the presenting author when submitting an abstract.

Degree of Novelty Required

All clinical and research topics pertaining to lasers and energy devices in any specialty are welcome.
Novelty and quality research will be a priority for acceptance to a main session. Abstracts should be interesting and educational for all learners, including early career.

Multiple Submissions from the Same Authors or Institutions

While the same resident/fellow may be a co-author on multiple abstracts in the resident/fellow session, we ask that each resident/fellow serve as a presenter only once (i.e., be a subordinate or non-presenting author on other submissions).
Multiple submissions from different trainees in the same training program are welcome, and will be considered, and the submission of multiple abstracts from a program will not decrease the likelihood of acceptance of a particular abstract. That is, the goal is to have as many resident/fellow presenters as possible, and not to limit presentations to any specific number per program.

Need for Substantial Resident/Trainee Contribution

While abstracts need not be novel, they must be the product of significant work by the presenting resident or fellow. Work is defined to include planning, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, conclusion, and writing.
At least half of the work of producing the abstract must have been performed by residents and fellows, with the preponderance of this 50% by the presenter. While this criterion is necessarily vague, we ask that submitters respect its spirit.

Inclusion of Monitoring Senior Authors

To ensure adequate vetting and quality control, we ask that each abstract submission include at least one author who is a faculty member at the relevant training program, who has had substantial oversight over the abstract preparation process and has reviewed the final product before submission.
The monitoring senior author should be identified during abstract submission.