Publication rate of presentations at an annual military orthopaedic meeting

Many research abstracts presented at orthopaedic conferences do not undergo a formal editorial, or peer-review process; however, abstracts are frequently referenced in textbooks and influence clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to determine the publication rate of abstracts formally presented at the Society of Military Orthopaedic Surgeons (SOMOS) annual meetings from 1998 to 2006 that went to full-text publication. Using Google Scholar and PubMed, a literature search was performed for each abstract presented at the annual SOMOS meeting in the years 1998-2006, to calculate the overall full-text publication rate, the average duration from presentation to publication, and the distribution of publications in the various journals. A total of 770 abstracts were presented at the annual SOMOS meetings. The overall full-text publication rate at a minimum of 3 years was 45.7% (352 publications). The average time from presentation to publication was 2.7 years. The published articles appeared in 65 peer-reviewed journals, with notable distribution in Spine (10.0%), The American Journal of Sports Medicine (9.4%), and The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (9.4%). The full-text publication rate of abstracts presented at the annual SOMOS meetings compares favorably with that of other major orthopaedic conferences in the United States. Nonetheless, more than half of abstracts presented at the SOMOS meetings remain unpublished.