Analysis of duplicate presentations accepted at two top international pediatric urology meetings

Meetings of the European Society for Pediatric Urology (ESPU) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are held annually to promote dissemination of new research findings among practitioners. We conducted an observational study determining the rate of duplicate research presentations at the two meetings.

A systematic, in-year, cross reference analysis of all clinical and basic research presentations at the ESPU and AAP meetings, for the years 2006-2009, was conducted. The search strategy included abstract title, authorship, country of origin, institution, study design, significance, and sample size. Three reviewers independently abstracted all data. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus.

In total, 566 abstracts were presented at the four ESPU meetings. Of these, 23 (4.1%) were also presented at an AAP meeting: 2 of 137 (1.5%) were represented in 2006, 6 of 139 (4.3%) in 2007, 6 of 126 (4.8%) in 2008, and 9 of 164 (5.5%) in 2009. Duplicate presentations were altered by changing the title (57%), adding or removing authors (48%), or changing authorship order (63%) or sample size (22%). Agreement between reviewers was above 90% (kappa = 0.913).

Although there was only a 4% duplicate presentation rate between the studied ESPU and AAP meetings, our results suggest a trend toward increasing duplication over the past 4 years.