General guidelines
To allow us to receive your abstract in the most efficient way possible, we request that you follow these guidelines when submitting an abstract for either an individual paper, a poster, or a set of abstracts for a symposium. While the submission form (see the relevant link for each type of submission below) will check the format of your submission, it is worthwhile preparing your abstract in a word processor in the first instance to be sure that you meet the word limit. The following format should be adopted for all abstracts submitted:

Title
  • The title of the paper should be in lower case with the first letter being upper case
  • No other words should have capital letters unless they are proper nouns
Authors
  • The authors' names should be in upper case
  • The first author is the presenting author
  • The first author's first name and email address are requested for correspondence
  • All authors are requested to provide their complete set of initials, entered without any spaces or punctuation
  • All author affiliations are requested
  • Spaces for additional authors will appear as you complete the details for each author.
Abstract
  • This should be a maximum of 1000 characters (including spaces) and should follow APA format
  • Abstracts should be written in the present tense
Key words
  • Please enter up to five key words that describe your presentation

Acceptance of submission

We will notify you of acceptance of your submission via the email address you enter on the submission form. Please ensure that this is correct. You should be notified of acceptance within two to four weeks.

Individual paper guidelines
Your abstract should be submitted as an individual paper only if you are not part of a symposium. If you presentation is due to be part of a symposium, please send your abstract and associated details to the convenor of your symposium. He or she will then submit it via the symposium submission page.

Delegates may only be the first presenting author on one presentation (individual paper or symposium presentation). They can appear as co-authors on additional papers, and lead authors on posters, but can only present one paper.

You can submit your individual presentation on the abstract submission page.

Poster guidelines
The organising committee welcomes submissions of posters from all delegates. We invite submissions of posters even if you are the presenting author of another paper at the conference.

To help you prepare your poster for the conference, we have reproduced the very helpful guidelines prepared by Ken Mavor for the 2006 SASP conference. You can find them here.

When you are ready to submit your poster abstract, use the abstract submission page.

Symposium guidelines
In addition to the information requested in the general guidelines, convenors of symposia are also requested to prepare an abstract for the symposium. This should also be a maximum of 200 words (1000 characters including spaces). In addition to a long title, we request a short title to allow us to prepare the conference program. This short title should be no longer than 10 words (100 characters including spaces).

There is space for three convenors to be listed on the submission page. If you require additional space, please use the notes field at the bottom of the page.

The submission page allows up to 12 papers to be submitted as part of a symposium. If you require more than this, you will need to break your submission into two symposia. If you do this, please use the same title for each submission and append a number 1 to title of the group of papers that should appear first in the program, and a number 2 to the title of the group of papers that should appear second.

The organising committee asks that you consider submitting a symposium in one of the following sizes: 3, 4, 5, 7, or 8. This will assist us with fitting your symposium into the schedule without awkward breaks between papers.

Symposia convenors are requested to collect the abstracts for all participants in their symposium, and ensure that the information is consistent with the general guidelines provided above. Convenors should then submit the symposium abstract along with the abstracts for the participants' presentations at the same time using the abstract submission page.