Meeting abstracts to published manuscripts: how does emergency ultrasound compare?

Very little is known about publication rates of emergency ultrasound abstracts as peer-reviewed manuscripts in the years after their presentation at national meetings. The objectives of this study were to determine trends in publication patterns of emergency ultrasound abstracts presented at Society for Academic Emergency Medicine and American College of Emergency Physicians annual national meetings as full indexed articles in peer-reviewed journals and compare emergency ultrasound with emergency medical services (EMS) and toxicology subspecialties.

A cross-sectional study was conducted at an academic medical center. All emergency ultrasound, EMS, and toxicology abstracts presented at both national meetings from 1999 to 2008 were entered into a database. An online PubMed/MEDLINE search was performed for full-length peer-reviewed manuscript publications corresponding to these abstracts. The proportion of abstracts presented, manuscript publication rate, time to publication, type of journal (emergency medicine versus non-emergency medicine), and journal impact factor were compared across the 3 subspecialties.

Over the 10-year period, 452 emergency ultrasound, 651 EMS, and 376 toxicology abstracts were presented at both meetings. The proportion of abstracts presented from 1999 to 2008 increased significantly for emergency ultrasound (1.7% versus 6.5%) compared with toxicology (3.5% versus 4.9%) and EMS (8.1% versus 5.8%; P < .01). There were no significant differences in manuscript publication rates between emergency ultrasound (22.8%), EMS (23.4%), and toxicology (20.7%). No significant differences were found in the time to publication (P = .53) and journal type (P = .2) between the 3 subspecialties.

The emergency ultrasound manuscript publication rate and mean time to publication compare favorably with EMS and toxicology subspecialties.