Fate of abstracts presented at the 2004-2008 International Liver Transplantation Society meetings.

Only 20.5% to 61.6% of abstracts presented at biomedical meetings are subsequently published as full-length articles. The aim of this study was to analyze the abstract-to-publication rate of International Liver Transplantation Society (ILTS) meeting abstracts. Abstracts presented at 5 consecutive annual ILTS meetings (2004-2008) were included to ensure a minimum follow-up period of 4 years. For each abstract, a PubMed Central search was conducted with the first author's name and affiliation along with keywords from the title. The following abstract characteristics were examined and used to obtain the abstract-to-publication rate: (1) the year of presentation, (2) the presentation category (plenary session, concurrent oral presentation, or poster presentation), (3) the type of study (randomized clinical study, case report, other clinical study, or basic science study), (4) the first author's discipline (surgery, medicine, anesthesiology/critical care medicine, pathology, radiology, or pharmacology), and (5) the location of the authors (ie, an English-speaking or non-English-speaking country). A total of 2345 abstracts (469 ± 144 abstracts per meeting) were presented, and 913 of those abstracts (38.9%) were expanded into full-length publications. It took 46 months for 90% of the abstracts to be published as full-length journal articles. The abstract-to-publication rates differed with the year of abstract presentation (50.2% in 2004, 45.9% in 2005, 47.6% in 2006, 30.6% in 2007, and 30.3% in 2008; P < 0.001), with the presentation category (49.6% for plenary sessions, 48.5% for concurrent oral presentations, and 34.8% for poster presentations; P < 0.001), and with the type of study (66.7% for randomized clinical studies, 63.1% for basic science studies, 36.7% for other clinical studies, and 35.0% for case reports; P < 0.001). Abstracts from authors from non-English-speaking countries had a higher publication rate (41.1% versus 33.6%, P < 0.001). No differences were found between first authors' disciplines.