Fate of abstracts presented at the 2009 American Transplant Congress

Oral and poster presentations at major meetings serve to rapidly present and share study results with the scientific community. On the other hand, full-text publication of abstracts in peer-reviewed journals provides dissemination of knowledge. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the publication rate of abstracts presented at the 2009 American Transplant Congress (ATC), to assess the factors influencing publication and determine the impact factor of these journals.

All abstracts presented at the 2009 ATC were included in the study. A Pubmed-Medline search was performed to identify a matching journal article. Topics, country of origin, study type, study center and publication year were tabulated. Journals and impact factors of publication were noted.

Out of 1938 oral and posters abstracts presented, 103 (16.6%) of oral abstracts and 141 poster abstracts (10.9%) were published as full-text articles. Publication rates according to topics of the meeting and country of origin did demonstrate statistical significant differences (p < 0.05). Single-centered studies had higher publication rates 70.87% (73/103) than multi-centered studies among oral abstracts. Abstracts from multi-centered studies had higher publication rates among poster abstracts (68.09% vs. 31.91%), and the journals they were published in had higher impact factors than single center studies (4.578 vs. 3.897). The median impact factor of the journals was 4.2 (4.8 for oral presentations and 3.627 for poster presentations) that went on to be published as full text manuscripts. When comparing multi-center and single institutions, the difference between 12 month and 24 month publication rates was not statistically significant (p = 0.5443 and 0.1134). However, oral and poster abstracts published by study center (multi/single) did demonstrate a statistically significant difference (p < 0.0001); comparing the type of study, there was also a statistically significant difference between the oral and poster abstract (p < 0.0001).

The publication rate for abstracts of this 2009 ATC was lower than rates from other fields of medicine. Factors leading to failure require elucidation. Encouraging authors to submit their presentations for full-text publication might improve the rate of publication. Authors should be wary of accepting oral and poster abstracts as dogma; authors should refrain from citing them in publications especially if they are from outside United States and are about liver and kidney transplantation.