Reviewers may abstain from reviewing any assigned submission. To allow reviewers to do this, add a special type of field to the reviewer form.

Creating the Abstain field on the Reviewer Form

1. Click Dashboard
   
2. Click Speaker module
3. Click Review button
   
1. If using the Paper review, click Review Papers in the left side menu.
   
2. If using the multi-review module, select from the Select Review Module dropdown list, the review module you wish to open
4. Click Review Fields in the horizontal menu
5. Click Add new field, add a Check Box field type
   
   • If you have an existing field on the form click Edit on the existing Field, then skip to Step 7
6. Enter a label e.g. Conflict of Interest
7. Set Field Definition = Abstain
   
8. You may also update the button label that will appear on the reviewer form for the Abstain field in the Abstain Form Submit Button label. 
   
   
9. Click Add/Update button to save changes

Only check box fields can be made into an abstain field.

This is because the front-end of the review site (where reviewers will see it) is set up such that only a reviewer who wants to abstain will check this box.

An example of the front-end view is below:

1. If a reviewer is not going to abstain, they will just skip this section of the review form and continue below like normal.

The reviewer must click the checkbox, then click the Submit button. If a reviewer accidentally scores/answers any of the questions on the review form, the values will be cleared out. When submitting an abstention, the review will be marked complete.

Admin Notifications

To configure Admin emails so the admin receives an email when a reviewer submits an abstention.

1. Click Dashboard
2. Click Speaker module
3. Click Review button
   
1. If using the Paper review, click Review Papers in the left side menu.
   
2. If using the multi-review module, select from the Select Review Module dropdown list, the review module you wish to open
4. Click Settings in the horizontal menu
5. Scroll down to the field labelled: Abstain Admin Notification, set this to Yes
6. Enter an email(s) in the field labelled: Abstain Admin Email List
   
   • Note: to enter more than 1 email address, separate the emails with a ; (semi-colon) e.g. person1@email.com;person2@email.com
7. Scroll down, click Update button to save changes