Fate of abstracts presented at the 2002 IFCC meeting.

BACKGROUND

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 International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) Meeting, to assess the factors influencing publication and determine the impact factor of these journals.

METHODS

All poster abstracts presented at the 2002 IFCC Meeting were included in the study. A 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.

RESULTS

Out of 900 presented abstracts, 125 (13.9%) were published as full-text articles. Publication rates according to topics of the meeting, country of origin and university affiliation demonstrated significant differences. Abstracts from multi-centered studies had higher publication rates, and the journals they were published in had higher impact factors than single center studies. The median impact factor of the journals was 2.093. According to regression analysis, the major predictors for publication were interventional research and university affiliation (odds ratios 2.916 and 1.782, respectively; p < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

The publication rate for abstracts of this clinical chemistry meeting 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.