To successfully delegate conference submissions and save your energy, you should divide the submission process into distinct administrative tasks—such as formatting, reference checking, and portal data entry—and assign them to co-authors or research assistants.
Submitting to academic conferences is an essential part of sharing your work and navigating the peer review process, but the administrative heavy lifting can quickly lead to research burnout. By effectively distributing the workload, you can focus your mental energy on crafting a compelling narrative rather than wrestling with submission portals and formatting guidelines.
Here is a practical approach to delegating the conference submission process.
Break Down the Submission Requirements
Before delegating, carefully review the Call for Papers (CFP). Deconstruct the submission into actionable steps. Typical tasks include drafting the abstract, formatting the manuscript to match the specific conference template (such as IEEE or ACM), compiling author affiliations, managing citations, and navigating the online submission system. Creating a clear list prevents confusion and ensures no requirement is overlooked.
Play to Your Team's Strengths
Distribute tasks among your co-authors and lab members based on their expertise and availability. While the lead author should focus on finalizing the main text and data interpretation, junior researchers or research assistants can take ownership of formatting figures, checking word counts, and compiling supplementary materials. If you have a corresponding author, they are usually best suited to handle the actual communication with the conference organizers.
Automate Tedious Tasks
Delegation doesn't just mean handing tasks to other people; you can also delegate the most repetitive work to smart tools. Managing references is notoriously time-consuming, but instead of having a co-author manually check every source, you can use WisPaper's TrueCite to automatically find and verify citations, eliminating the risk of hallucinated references and ensuring your bibliography is perfectly formatted. Automating these checks saves hours of manual labor for your entire team.
Establish a Centralized Timeline
Set up a shared checklist using project management tools like Trello, Notion, or a simple spreadsheet. Assign clear, individual deadlines for each delegated task. Crucially, set your internal team deadline for at least three to five days before the official conference deadline. This buffer protects your team from last-minute panic caused by technical glitches, missing co-author PINs, or slow submission portals.
Designate a Final Reviewer
Even when the workload is highly distributed, a single person needs to be responsible for the final quality check. This person should review the assembled document for flow, verify that all co-author details are correct in the portal, and ultimately press the submit button. This ensures that the final manuscript remains cohesive and professional, despite being a collaborative effort.
