*If you don’t finish your submission before the deadline, or if you’d prefer to take your time and submit later, don’t worry! Full Submission for ICUR 2025 will open on Tuesday 19th November and remain open until 31st January 2025. The submission form will be exactly the same. Anyone who has begun (but not completed) a submission by the Early Bird deadline will be contacted directly to ask if they would like to continue working on their submission for the later deadline.
If you have an Oxford Abstracts account, you can log in here as normal. If you don’t have an Oxford Abstracts account already, you’ll need to create one – please ensure that you are using your student email address to create this account.
When you have logged in or created your account, you will arrive at the submission information page. Please make sure you take the time to read this page carefully! Click Next when you have finished reading.
The application form looks quite long, but some elements of it will take much less time – and remember that you do not have to complete your submission in one sitting! You can log out and back in to complete it any time before the submission deadline.
On the next page, you will be asked to identify your team’s Lead Presenter. The Lead Presenter will be the primary correspondent for your submission with the ICUR team, and they must be an undergraduate student.
Below Lead Presenter, you should fill in the details of the Authors for your project. The first author is usually the Lead Presenter (and if you are the only presenter, this will be you!) Please make sure you use university email addresses for all authors.
Next, you will need to decide on the form of presentation you would like to do. The options for presenting at ICUR are spoken, poster, and alternative forms of presentation: you can read more about these on our Resources for Students (Developing Your Presentation). If you are interested in presenting your research in more than one form, you may tick more than one option – however, please note that this is not a guarantee. Please note also that not all forms of presentation are available to all institutions – this will be stated on the submission form.
Next, you will be asked to fill out some details about your project. Ethical approval for any research which involves human or animal participants is extremely important – if you are unsure about this, please make sure that you speak to your supervisor or to another member of staff at your institution.
Then, you will begin to construct your abstract itself. First, you are asked to fill out answers to four questions about your research – Why? What? So what? Now what?
This part of the process is designed to help you follow the IATL Method for abstract writing (a requirement for ICUR) and to consider all the information you might need to include in your abstract. When it comes to the abstract review, only your abstract is assessed – not your answers to these questions – but these answers are prompts to help you think about how a non-specialist, interdisciplinary audience member might react to your research. More information about the IATL Method for abstract writing is available on our Resources for Students (Writing and Submitting Your Abstract).
Your abstract reviewers will be able to see your answers to these questions, even though they are not being assessed. This will help them to understand your thought process in putting your abstract together, and to offer more constructive feedback.
Now it’s time to write your abstract itself! Many people find that they can just put together their answers to the four questions (with some editing for flow and readability), and this creates a strong abstract. Others prefer to start from scratch – or perhaps to adapt an existing abstract. Remember that you do not have to finish your submission now – you can always come back to it before the deadline! (And if you’ve started but not finished an Early Bird submission by the deadline, we’ll contact you to ask if you’d like to continue to develop it for the full submission deadline in January).
Next, we ask you to think about different ways in which interdisciplinary audiences might be able to connect with your research (and how you might be able to connect with research from other disciplines!) If you haven’t thought about interdisciplinary connections before, you might be find it useful to read our Introduction to Interdisciplinarity, available in our Resources for Students (Everything You Need To Know Before Applying).
Finally, you will need to provide us with some key participation information, and you will be asked to confirm your understanding and consent for several aspects of the conference to facilitate your participation and our management of the event.
Then, just click “Submit”!
As above, you can log back into your submission and make any amendments as many times as you want before the abstract submission deadline closes (Early Bird 18th November 2024, Full Submission 31st January 2025).