Call for Scientific Abstracts and Educational Workshop submissions opens January 29th, 2024 for #SIO2024
We are excited to announce the opening for both Scientific Abstracts and Educational Workshops submissions for the 21st SIO International Conference, hosted by City of Hope on October 25-27th 2024 in Costa Mesa California, with the conference theme “Full Circle Translational Integrative Oncology – from bedside to bench and back”. Submissions are welcome from all members of the integrative oncology community including trainees and persons with a cancer diagnosis.
Please be forewarned that unlike in years past we will likely not be having an extended deadline for workshop or abstract submissions, so respect the deadline dates! Click here to link to the Oxford Abstracts submission portal for scientific abstracts. Click here to link to the Oxford Abstracts submission portal for educational workshop submissions.
The 21st annual conference will have both in person and virtual attendance options, but workshops will only be available to those who attend in person and will not be recorded for the virtual attendees. We will have five slots of 75 minutes to host an educational workshop during the core schedule of the conference from October 25-27th, and 2 slots of 120 minutes to offer a more detailed educational workshop on the morning prior to the official start of the conference on Friday October 25th Friday at 10:15am. Those who are selected to present a scientific abstract (poster or oral) or an educational workshop are expected to present physically in-person, not virtually.
Although SIO has identified English as the most common language among its members, SIO is committed to language access. If you need accommodations for language access, please let us know. We will do our best to facilitate.
The deadline to submit educational workshops is midnight Pacific Time on March 15, 2024. The deadline to submit scientific abstracts will be midnight Pacific Time on April 8st, 2024, extended past April 1st due to the overlapping Easter Weekend.
The submissions must be relevant to the field of integrative oncology, and should specifically address the conference theme: “Full Circle Translational Integrative Oncology – from bedside to bench and back (the transformative power of clinical observation to ignite scientific discovery and optimize patient outcomes)”
Members of the SIO 2024 Scientific Review Committee will evaluate the quality of scientific abstract submissions based on the following criteria:
- Significance – impact on the science and practice of integrative oncology
- Approach – Study design, sample size, novelty of research
- Presentation – Clarity, logic, completeness of data presented
- Relevance to conference theme
Scores will be given for each category on a 1-5 scale. Commercial bias is not a reason for automatic exclusion but must be acknowledged in the proposal and a plan to manage that bias made clear in the proposal if appropriate. This is a simpler scoring criteria compared to last year. Scientific abstracts will have a 500 word limit.
Members of the SIO 2024 Education Committee will evaluate the quality of the educational workshop submissions based on the following criteria:
- Scientific support and content – how much of the workshop content is backed up by scientific research?
- Impact on Clinical Practice – will attendees potentially benefit in terms of seeing better clinical outcomes?
- Clarity/Interactivity – proposal provides clear goals, content and level of experiential involvement or interactive discussion with attendees (more the better)
- Diversity/Inclusion – generally we would like to see a diversity of speakers from different cancer centers, qualifications, and perspectives, with language sensitivity
- Relevance to conference theme
To be clear diversity and inclusion is equally important in scientific abstract review but will be more assimilated into the scoring for Approach/Presentation. For guidance on how diversity and inclusion principles influence the review process, we encourage authors to review this guidance on diversity and inclusion. Educational workshop submissions are limited to less than 1000 words.
Also please be aware that we will have an opening for “late breaking abstracts” after the above deadlines for educational workshops and scientific abstracts is past us, but abstracts submitted at that time will only be eligible for poster consideration (not oral presentation as that lineup will already have been decided).
The process of selecting and producing an educational workshop will undergo a significant change this year. The complete details of the changes we are implementing with the SIO educational workshops can be reviewed here [link to the SIO 2024 Educational Workshop FAQ]. In the first phase, we will be soliciting educational workshop submissions from Jan 29- March 15, 2024, as per usual process. However, in the selection process leading up to the actual workshop presentation, there will be a lot more creative license shared between the SIO Education Committee and the workshop author(s) to modify and improve the workshop speakers/content so that it can be the best possible workshop for SIO attendees. Multiple workshops might be selected and asked to merge their speakers/efforts to make a greater and better single workshop, better than just the sum of its parts.
Primary Author Responsibilities:
If the material has been accepted for publication or has recently been published, it is the author’s responsibility to make sure that the journal’s copyright rules are not violated. If chosen, the organizers and speakers must disclose conflicts of interest as required by continuing education accreditation bodies. Submissions are limited to a 1000 word maximum.
SIO has the right to review and select workshops and abstracts at its discretion for reconsideration in a different form. A common scenario might be that the workshop submission might not be at the top of the list, but the Education Committee might feel it still would serve as an excellent webinar for SIO attendees and applicants might be offered an opportunity to present the topic as a webinar outside of the annual conference format October 25-27th 2024.