Publications after conference presentations: A systematic review of published studies

Conferences provide an opportunity to present findings to an audience of experts in the field and get feedback for putting the research in context. Since conference proceedings provide limited space for presenting the findings, research publications are able to provide a better platform for the wider reach, scrupulous peer evaluation, and temporal consolidation of the medical scientific material. This review attempts to collate the studies which have evaluated the abstract publication ratio of the conference presentations.

The systematic review and meta-analysis included peer reviewed publications which quantitatively reported the publication rate of conference presentations.

A total of 28 studies were included, with sample sizes ranging from 82 to 1897 abstracts (total 17,172 abstracts). The publication rate ranged from 3.8% to 78.0%, with weighted mean publication rate of 41.8% (95% confidence interval of 34.1% to 49.5%). Oral presentations had a greater chance of being published as compared to poster presentations (odds ratio of 2.693, 95% confidence intervals of 1.285 to 5.646). There was high degree of heterogeneity in the findings.

A small proportion of the conference presentations ispublished. Efforts should be made to improve the abstract publication ratio to improve the wider dissemination of the available research.