AAGP Annual Meeting Submission Guidelines

The AAGP Program Committee encourages abstract submissions that incorporate positive aspects of aging while addressing critical issues related to the care of older adults, including the following suggested topic areas: 

• Innovations to enhance wellness for a diverse population of older adults and their caregivers
• Evidence-based treatment for conditions commonly experienced by older adults, with inclusion of non-pharmacologic and person-centered treatment approaches
• Issues related to diversity, culture, and ethnicity related to patient care, education and research

• Sex, sexuality, and gender identity 
• Approaches to better understand and combat ageism as it impacts geriatric care
• Interventions to address disparities in health care for older adults, particularly in underserved communities
• Developments in curriculum and training to prepare the next generation of care providers
• Cutting edge research initiatives and funding opportunities to enhance the lives and health of older adults

• General Sessions
  • Submissions Open: June 14, 2023
  • Submissions Due: August 7, 2023 11:59 PM EDT
• Clinical Case Presentations
  • Submissions Open: June 14, 2023
  • Submissions Due: August 7, 2023 11:59 PM EDT
• New Research Posters
  • Submissions Open: August 15, 2023
  • Submissions Due: September 30, 2023 11:59 PM EDT
• Early Investigator Posters
  • Submissions Open: August 15, 2023
  • Submissions Due: September 30, 2023 11:59 PM EDT
• Late-Breaking Research Posters
  • Submissions Open: December 1, 2023
  • Submissions Due: January 7, 2024 11:59 PM EDT

Please note that the above deadlines are subject to change. The Program Committee will not accept or consider late submissions.

Presentation Slides

All presentation slides are due by January 24, 2024 for review by the AAGP CME Committee. Instructions to submit slides will follow acceptance of presentations. These materials are required for attendees to receive Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit. As such, all materials must be in compliance with Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) rules (https://www.accme.org/accreditation-rules) and are reviewed by the AAGP CME Committee. Specifically, all presentations must include a disclosure slide (see next section) and a declaration whether or not any off-label use of medication is discussed. Materials are also made available online for all meeting attendees, including those unable to attend your live presentation.

Please note that failure to submit your presentation by January 15, 2024, could result in a loss of CME credit for the entire meeting and every attendee as well as automatic withdrawal of your general session or case presentation from the 2023 AAGP Annual Meeting. 

Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest

AAGP requires disclosure by presenters at CME activities of any financial interest or other affiliation with commercial organization(s) that may have a direct or indirect impact on the subject matter of the scientific program. AAGP’s policy on disclosure applies to financial interests of a presenter’s spouse/partner as well. A “financial interest” may include, but is not limited to, being a shareholder in the organization; being on retainer with the organization; or having research or honoraria paid by the organization. An “affiliation” may include holding a position on an advisory committee or some other role or benefit to a supporting organization. The existence of such relationships does not necessarily constitute a conflict of interest, but the prospective audience must be informed of the presenter’s affiliation with every commercial supporter by an acknowledgment in the slides as well as orally at the start of every session. In addition, each faculty who identifies a potential conflict will be asked to identify steps to resolve that conflict. This policy is intended to openly identify any potential conflict(s) so that members of the audience in an educational activity are able to form their own judgments about the presentation. AAGP also requires oral disclosure of discussion of unapproved uses of a commercial product or investigational use of a product not yet approved for this purpose. 

Registration and Travel Policy

All presenters must be paid registrants of the AAGP Annual Meeting. Expenses associated with the preparation, submission, and presentation of an abstract are the responsibility of the author(s)/presenter(s). All speakers and presenters are expected to make their own travel arrangements and pay their own expenses (with the exception of industry-supported programs and other sponsored workshop programs). All presenters will need to be available to present live in Atlanta during their presentation. 

Limit on Multiple Presentations

A speaker’s name may be submitted for multiple symposia. However, if all of the proposed symposia are accepted, any speaker at the AAGP Annual Meeting is limited to only participating in four (4) educational programs (industry supported and non-industry supported). If a speaker is listed as faculty on more than four programs, the speaker will be asked to find an appropriate substitute for one of the programs. This policy does not apply to scientific poster presentations. If a speaker is on more than one industry-supported symposium, they may only receive a travel stipend and an honorarium for one sponsored session.   

Eligibility

You do not need to be a member of AAGP to submit an abstract! Clinicians and investigators in geriatric psychiatry, psychology, neurology, medicine, nursing, social work, and other related disciplines are encouraged to submit abstracts of original work for presentation at the AAGP Annual Meeting. AAGP also welcomes the involvement of trainees and early career professionals as presenters. 

Review 

All session abstracts are reviewed by the AAGP Annual Meeting Program Committee and ranked on the basis of scientific merit and educational needs of AAGP attendees. All accepted session and poster abstracts (except Late-Breaking Research Posters**) will be published and available to all meeting attendees in a PDF supplement to the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. The Annual Meeting Program Committee’s decisions are final. Reviews are based on the following criteria: 

• Relevance to identified attendee needs 
• Inclusion of new data 
• Timeliness of topic 
• Diversity among presenters 
• Presentation balance between research and practice applications 
• Applicability to practice of geriatric psychiatry 
• Relationship to the Annual Meeting theme 
• Attention to diversity, culture, and ethnicity 

Please note that potentially outstanding presentations are, at times, given a lower priority score because the information and data supplied with the submission were incomplete or inappropriate for a particular format. 

Publication

By submitting a proposal, you give AAGP the authority to electronically post your presentation, abstract, and learning objectives online, and to publish them in printed materials. You are responsible for editing your abstract and providing copy in final, print-ready form. However, AAGP reserves the right to edit any part of the abstract submission for consistency, grammar, and target audience as we deem necessary. 

Don’t Wait till the Last Minute! 

Submission is a multi-step process, and it requires advance information from all participants. Begin the submission process early so that you have time to edit or add additional information. You can save your submission in draft form and re-visit it prior to the submission deadline to make changes as needed. 

General Sessions 

Each general session will be 90 minutes, including at least 20 minutes committed to audience participation. General sessions include a Session Chair and up to five additional Session Speakers/Discussants for a total of no more than six total presenters. Please note that given the brief time, fewer speakers will lead to a more in-depth presentation. 

The Session Chair will serve as the contact person for the Program Committee and facilitate any changes as directed by the Program Committee, work with the faculty to refine individual presentations to ensure that the program is well rounded and free from commercial bias, and ensure final slides are submitted in a timely manner. In addition, the Session Chair is responsible for entering the entire submission in the Abstract Submission Portal. 

• The Session Chair should submit: 

• A title, session description , overall abstract (detailed description of the session), needs assessment (description of why this session is important and relevant to the meeting theme), four learning objectives, track, and three CME questions with reference and a brief agenda (for reviewers only). Maximum of 5,000 characters combined. 
• The brief agenda should be a simple outline of the session. Example below:
  • Background/Introduction  (10 minutes), Speaker name
  • Speaker 1 and topic (20 minutes)
  • Speaker 2 and topic:  (20 minutes)
  • Speaker 3 and topic (20 minutes) 
  •  Discussion/Questions (20 minutes)

• For each individual Speaker or Discussant, including the Chair, the Session Chair should also submit participant abstracts. Participant abstracts describe what each presenter will discuss during the session. 
• A title for the portion of the session led by each session faculty member, including the Chair and each Speaker or Discussant 
• An individual abstract for each Speaker or Discussant, including the Chair, limited to 5,000 characters. 
• The name, degrees, affiliation, phone, email, CV and brief bio (100 words) for each Speaker or Discussant, including the Chair. 

Helpful Tips for Your Submission

Learning Objectives 

Educational activities offering CME/CE should be designed with the intent of changing competency/skills/performance/patient outcomes. Objectives must be behavioral rather than instructional:

• Competence (knowing how to do something; having the knowledge/ability to apply knowledge, skills and judgment in practice; new strategies one might consider putting into practice)
• Performance (what one actually puts into practice)
• Patient outcomes (patient health status)

Tips for Writing Good Objectives:

Objectives should address these questions¹:

• What should the result of the educational activity be for participants?
• What should the participant be able to do after attending the activity?
• Make sure that objectives are measurable and relate directly to reducing the identified practice gap
• State what the learner might do differently (behavioral change) because of what has been learned

• Use verbs which allow measurable outcome and thus can then be used in the evaluation process

¹Adopted from the APA Guidelines for Developing CE Learner-Centered Objectives

CME Questions 

Each submission will require three (3) CME questions related to the content of the presentation to test the learner’s knowledge on the information presented. Each question also requires a reference to be submitted.

CME questions should:

• Ensure that each objective is assessed by at least 1 question.
• Questions are simple, clearly stated, and measure only the educational objective for which they were designed.
• Questions should be written either in multiple-choice or true/false format. In general, no more than 20% of the questions should be true/false.

• Multiple choice questions should have four options, and options should be specific and distinct. Avoid using “all of the above” and language like “b and c are both correct.”
• Assess the important, take-home concepts of the educational activity.

Guidelines for developing questions:

• Ensure that each question is similar in terms of grammatical construction, length, and complexity.
• Answer choices should be uniform in length and style and grammatically consistent with the question.

• Avoid using the same or similar words in both the question and the correct answer as this may clue the participant to the correct answer.
• Write options that are grammatically consistent and logically compatible with the question stem; list them in logical or alphabetical order.
• Write distractors (the incorrect answers) that are plausible and the same relative length as the correct answer.
• Avoid using vague terms such as usually and frequently.
• Pose the question in the affirmative; avoid the use of negative statements such as "not" and "except" because they are often confusing.

Avoid the following:

• Grammatical cues: one or more incorrect answers don’t follow grammatically from the question stem.
• Long correct answer: correct answer is longer, more specific, or more complete than other options.
• Word repeats: a word or phrase is included in the question stem and in the correct answer.
• The easy way out: “None of the above” or “all of the above” used as an option. ²

²Adopted from ASHP Preparing Test Questions and Answers for CE Activities

CME Question References

Each CME question requires a reference submitted. Provide the reference in Vancouver style (examples below) and provide the page and paragraph number. Note, that you do not need to type out a defense of your answer as a rationale. The page number and location will suffice.

Reference style examples:

• Journal article: Smith JJ. The world of science. Am J Sci. 1999; 36:234-5.
• Article by DOI: Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s001090000086
• Book: Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.
• Book chapter: Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. pp. 251-306.
• Online document: Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Clinical Case Presentations 

Clinical Case Presentations are 90 minute sessions with three individual clinical presentations chosen by the Program Committee. Total presentation time (including questions) will be 30 minutes per clinical case. If you would like to submit an individual case presentation, please include: 

• Overall abstract (description of the case), needs assessment (description of why this case is important and relevant to the meeting theme), Two (2) learning objectives, and at least three (3) keywords. Maximum of 5,000 characters. 

New Research Posters 

New Research posters are self-explanatory visual presentations of unpublished research work. Abstracts should not be submitted for consideration as a New Research Poster if the same research work is already accepted for publication in a scientific journal at the time of submission for the AAGP Annual Meeting. Poster Abstracts should include: 

• A Title, Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion, funding sources, upload tables and/or images, topic area and at least 1 keyword (maximum of 5,000 characters). Abstracts for accepted posters will be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, and available to attendees online. AAGP will not edit poster abstracts, so please ensure the written submission is in final form. Abstracts cannot be withdrawn from publication after December 31, 2023. The presenter is required to be present during specified poster session hours for informal discussions about their research with meeting attendees. Posters will be attached to a bulletin board that measures 45" (vertical) by 90" (horizontal). 

Early Investigator Posters 

This special section is a sub-set of the New Research Posters, designed to highlight the research of students, residents, trainees, research fellows and clinical fellows, as well as junior faculty and K-awardees who are no more than two (2) years post fellowship training. If you wish to be considered in this special category, please submit under the Early Investigator submission role when submitting your abstract online. The abstract submission requirements for early investigator posters are the same as those described above for new research posters. 

Late-Breaking Research Posters 

The AAGP Annual Meeting Program Committee has reserved a few select slots for a limited number of late-breaking research posters with a deadline of January 7, 2024. Please note that due to the lateness of the submission, late-breaking posters might not be included in the AJGP Abstract Supplement. Late-breaking research posters should include abstracts that describe important current research advances and have not been submitted previously. Late-breaking abstracts are not a second chance for those who missed the official abstract deadline. State-of-the-art studies with up-to-date results will be considered as late-breaking abstracts. Late-breaking abstracts reporting secondary data analyses must include an explanation for why they were not submitted as of the regular deadline. The selection of abstracts will be based on scientific quality and novelty of research either in basic or clinical science. 

Each poster submitter will have the opportunity to indicate if they would like to considered for an oral presentation. There will be three sessions that feature oral abstract presentations as selected by the Research Committee. Each oral presentation will be 12 minutes with 3 minutes for Q&A. Submitters will be notified in late January 2024 if selected for an oral presentation.

All submissions are made through the 2024 Annual Meeting Abstract Submission Portal. We welcome you to submit a proposal for a symposium or case presentation that will enhance our ability to provide care to our patients, conduct research on late-life mental illness and its effective treatments, and train the workforce needed to provide high quality care now and in the future.

Click Here To Submit