Publication Rate of Abstracts Presented at the Shoulder and Elbow Session of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery

Abstract

Many shoulder and elbow abstracts presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meeting are cited in the orthopaedic literature or are used to guide orthopaedic practice, but not all of these abstracts are submitted, survive peer review, or eventually are published. Presuming unpublished works have not been scientifically confirmed, one could question whether it is academically responsible to cite abstracts presented at the AAOS before they are peer-reviewed and published. To partly address this issue we determined the peer-reviewed publication rate for 558 abstracts (233 papers and 325 posters) presented at the shoulder and elbow sessions of the AAOS from 1999 to 2004. In April 2007, we searched the computerized database MEDLINE 1 and PubMed 1 for published articles based on these abstracts. We examined the published articles to assess publication rate, time to publication, change in contents, change in authors, and change in conclusions of abstracts. The overall publication rate in peer-reviewed journals was 58% (321 of 558), similar to other orthopaedic meetings and medical disciplines. We believe it is unacceptable to cite shoulder and elbow abstracts submitted to the AAOS because only slightly more than ½ (58%) of them are authenticated scientifically.

Publication Rate of Abstracts Presented at the Annual Congress of the European Society for Surgical Research during 2008-2011

“…The overall PRs reported in similar studies were within the range of 12.5-58%, which is comparable to the PR observed in our study (40.9%) [1,3,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Of the 803 OP abstracts and 565 PP abstracts presented at the ESSR meetings, 48.7 and 29.7% were published as articles in journals, respectively.…”

“…This result is consistent with studies on the publication of abstracts. In general, OPs are more likely to be converted into articles [1,3,14,15,18]. …”

Publication rates of presentations at annual scientific meetings of turkish neurosurgical society

“…Publication rates of 11-78% were mentioned in these studies (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)20,22,23,25,26). Specifically, publication rate of presentations of the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons was 34% (1).…”

“…The scientific meetings are the most available areas at which results can be presented to colleagues before submission to peer-reviewed journals. Besides, new ideas and questions may emerge in the discussions (4,19). Results presented at scientific meetings find ground by being applied to clinical practice (4).…”

“…As the peer review and revision process takes time, we expect more studies to be accepted in later years. It was also found that overall time for an abstract to be indexed in Medline/Pubmed is 5 years and 90% of the abstracts presented at a meeting get published within 4 years (4,(20)(21)(22). So, we compared 2011 TNS annual meeting results with 2003 AANS and CNS annual meeting results (both are starting points for the two studies) to enable a healthier conclusion.…”