The AGMA Fall Technical Meeting Process

AGMA’s Fall Technical Meeting (FTM) is the best place in the U.S. to share gear manufacturing research. If you want to write a paper and present, here is how it works.

AGMA uses an online portal to streamline the process. Because we have less than a year for the entire cycle—from abstract submission to publishing the paper—we must have firm deadlines.

Call for Papers. Whether it originates in your company’s R&D department or is included in your school’s research objectives, share your research! We look for material that is at the right level for FTM (not too simplistic); not too commercial; original subject matter (although an expansion on previous research is acceptable); and relevant to the gear manufacturing industry.

Through the online portal, authors submit 200–300-word abstracts. Presenters must be able to travel to the United States to present in person for the paper to be published.

The committee managing the FTM program consists of engineers in the industry. They review the abstracts according to the above criteria (they do not know the identity of the authors). The abstracts are rated, and the top 30 are discussed for selection. If there are too many abstracts for one subject, the lowest-rated submission in that topic is removed. Keep in mind that abstract acceptance or rejection is not a personalized decision.

Once the committee decides which abstracts to accept, emails go out to authors, notifying them of their abstract’s acceptance or rejection. If not selected for the FTM, we try to involve our authors as either an emerging technology presentation or article in Gear Technology or PTE.

Review draft. For accepted abstracts, authors have approximately three months to write their paper. This paper must be complete with all research and analysis so peer reviewers can provide a comprehensive review, and authors should use the provided FTM paper template.

During this phase, authors will sign a license agreement that gives AGMA the right to publish, sell, and distribute the paper. The author(s) retain the rights of ownership of the paper. AGMA also needs the speaker’s biography and photo and a shortened version of the abstract for marketing.

Peer review. AGMA requires peer review for technical papers to ensure relevance, accuracy, and reliability of the research. Engineers in the industry volunteer to review the papers. The committee then chooses three subject matter experts to review each paper. Peer reviews are double-blind to prevent bias, so the peer reviewer does not know the identity of the author, and vice versa.

The selected peer reviewers then rate the paper for each criterion:

• Introduction and body of the paper clearly states objective(s).
• Supporting materials (equations, data, graphs, figures, tables) are relevant, accurate, and clear.
• Conclusion is supported by presented material and answers the stated objective(s).
• The paper is free of commercialism and does not promote a company or any system, process, tool, machine, material, or software specific to a company.

Peer reviewers then give an overall acceptance recommendation: approve as-is or with editorial comments only; approve with substantive technical comments; or disapprove. If you’d like to be a peer reviewer and have technical expertise, please contact ftm@agma.org.

If two of the three peer reviewers disapprove, the paper is assessed to see if it can be edited. If the paper needs substantive changes, AGMA contacts the author to see if he or she can make the necessary changes. If so, the author receives all peer reviewer feedback and verifies how they will change the paper to meet the criteria.

Final paper. The peer review results (for those papers not needing substantive changes) are then available, and the authors have about two months to make final edits to the paper. An AGMA staff then finalizes the paper for distribution.

PowerPoint presentation. Finally, authors submit their PowerPoint. Presenters should practice their presentation ahead of time to stay within their 20-minute time at FTM.

And that’s the process!