Publication rates of presentations made at annual meetings of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and the Arthroscopy Association of North America.

The purpose of this study was to determine the publication rates of presentations made at the annual meetings of 2 sports medicine specialty societies--the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) and the Arthroscopy Association of North America (AANA). We created a database covering annual AOSSM meetings from 1990 to 1993 (4 years) and annual AANA meetings from 1991 to 1993 (3 years) and searched the Melvyl Medline Plus database for abstracts from 1990 through 1998 to determine which had been published in peer-reviewed journals. Of the 333 abstracts listed for the 1990 to 1993 meetings, 198 (59.5%) were published in peer-reviewed journals. Publication rates of the AOSSM and AANA meetings were 68.1% and 50.9%, respectively. The majority of articles were published in American Journal of Sports Medicine (40.1%) and Arthroscopy (30.3%). Publication rates of presentations made at meetings of these sports medicine specialty societies are high and exceed the publication rates associated with meetings of other medicine specialty societies.