Forms grow by accretion
No one designs a twenty-eight-field abstract form. It arrives one committee request at a time: a funding declaration here, a presentation-preference dropdown there, a free-text box added the year someone needed to know something and never removed.
The cost is invisible because the people who abandon the form are, by definition, not in the data you look at.
An audit that takes an afternoon
- Export last year’s submissions and count how many times each optional field was left empty.
- For every field, name the person who reads it and the decision it informs. If you cannot name both, it is a candidate for deletion.
- Check which fields could be derived from the member record you already hold.
A field that is empty in sixty percent of submissions is not collecting data. It is collecting abandonment.
What usually survives
Title, authors, affiliations, category, body, and a conflict-of-interest declaration. Almost everything else is either derivable, better asked after acceptance, or of interest to exactly one committee member who would be happy to receive it by email.
Shortening the form is not a cosmetic exercise. For most societies, submission volume is the input to programme quality, and the form is the narrowest point in the funnel.
