The Fate of Abstracts Presented at the 2013 and 2014 Annual Meetings of the Romanian Society of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

BACKGROUND: Oral and poster presentations at annual national meetings of the Romanian Society of Gastroenterology and Hepatology (RSGH) provide a forum for education, communication and discussion of new research. However, for the wide-spread dissemination of the new research work, each presentation should be subsequently published as a full-text article in peer-reviewed, indexed journals.

AIM: to evaluate the publication rate of full-text articles in peer-reviewed journals after being first presented as abstracts at two consecutive RSGH annual meetings.

METHODS: A retrospective review of all abstracts presented at the annual meetings in 2013 and 2014 was performed. PubMed and Google Scholar were searched using abstract titles, first author's name and affiliation, and key words from the title to identify whether an abstract resulted in a peer-reviewed publication. Abstracts published in full-text were subsequently assessed for study type, study center, topics, publication year, journals and their impact factors (IFs). We chose the 2013 and 2014 meetings to ensure a minimum two-year follow-up period since the last meeting for the publication as full-length articles.

RESULTS: A total of 562 abstracts were presented (275 in 2013, 287 in 2014). There were 150 oral presentations (93 in 2013, 57 in 2014) and 412 poster presentations (182 in 2013, 230 in 2014). Fifty seven of them (10.1%) were published as full-text articles, among them 26 (17.3%) after oral presentations and 31 (7.5%) after poster presentations (P=0.001). University affiliation and original research work were most likely to be published. The average IFs of the journals which published the articles were 2.42 in 2013 and 1.87 in 2014.

CONCLUSION: The publication rate for the annual RSGH meetings abstracts as full-text articles in peer-reviewed journals is very low compared to the analyses performed in gastroenterology or other medical specialities from other countries. It is not clear yet what are the factors responsible for the failure of publication.