Scholarly output from the Pediatric Trauma Society annual meeting: A 7-year review

Prior scholarly output analysis of the Pediatric Trauma Society revealed that less than 50% of presented abstracts from 2014 to 2016 resulted in publication. With growth of the society, we hypothesized that scientific output has since improved, leading to more high-quality publications.

We retrospectively reviewed all oral presentation abstract acceptances at the Pediatric Trauma Society annual meetings from 2017 to 2023. Using PubMed and Google Scholar, we were able to identify the abstracts that resulted in publication. Using the Web of Science database, we identified manuscript characteristics such as the publishing journal's impact factor and number of citations per article.

Over the 7-year period, 735 of 1,009 abstracts (73%) were accepted. The majority of accepted abstracts were oral presentations (n = 476, 65%), and most (n = 80, 17%) focused on "Trauma Systems and Epidemiology." Over half of the accepted oral presentation abstracts resulted in a manuscript publication (n = 246, 52%), with 16% (n = 40) of them being "Joseph Tepas Paper Competition" manuscripts. Manuscript publication rate from paper competitions increased from 42% to 100% over the last 7 years with half of them being published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery . Journal of Pediatric Surgery was the most common publishing journal for accepted abstracts overall (n = 39, 16%). The median publishing journal impact factor for associated manuscripts was 2.4 (interquartile range, 1.2-3), and the median number of times an article was cited was once per year (interquartile range, 0-2).

From 2017 to 2023, the rate of oral abstract acceptances remained stable, but the percentage of resultant publications increased from 47% to 52%. Evaluating scholarly output over the years provides insight into our organization's academic growth and highlights areas of success such as the paper competitions. ( J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 2026;101: e36-e40.).