Weekly Article: A PAS abstract does not mean publication

by Nazreen Jamal, Children's National

With PAS in town, I know we might all be a bit over-saturated with the latest research to come out in the field. To that end, I thought I would instead share an article that attempts to answer a question that came to my mind this weekend-- what happens to all these presentations from PAS? It seems like there are many more posters and abstract presentations than I ever see in print, so I was curious as to the fate of the rest of these projects.

The best answer I could find comes from a 2003 issue of Pediatrics, "Does Presentation Format at the Pediatric Academic Societies' Annual Meeting Predict Subsequent Publication". The authors aimed to determine the proportion of abstracts presented at the annual PAS meeting that were subsequently published in peer reviewed journals and to see if the presentation format (rejected by PAS, poster, poster symposium, or platform presentation) predicted subsequent publication, time to publication, or impact factor of journal in which the study was ultimately published.

 
Briefly, they did this by randomly selecting 80 abstracts of each of the 4 presentation formats (or all if the total number in a given format was less than 80) from 1998 and 1999, and then searching Medline in 2003 to see if the abstracts were published, and if so, when and in what journal. Logistic and linear regression were used to determine if the abstract's presentation format was associated with publication, time to publication, and the journal's impact factor.

They found that only 44.6% of abstracts presented at PAS were published within 4-5 years. There was a significant difference in publication rates of abstracts that were rejected by PAS (only 22.2% were eventually published), those presented in poster sessions (40.0%), poster symposia (44.1%), and platform presentations (53.8%). However, there were no significant associations between presentation format and time to publication or mean journal impact factor.

Granted, this article is 10 years old, but I thought it was interesting that less than half of the abstracts accepted to PAS were published 4-5 years later. I imagine the proportions are similar now (and perhaps even lower?) as the number of abstracts presented at PAS grows each year. It would have been more interesting if the authors had contacted the authors of abstracts that were not ultimately published-- was it due to rejection of the associated manuscripts or did the authors just not ever get around to writing up the abstract? The authors' point was that it is important to be cautious when interpreting and applying data presented at PAS as the abstracts often reflect preliminary results. As someone just out of fellowship it served a slightly different purpose--the recognition that having an abstract accepted to PAS, even as a platform presentation, sadly does not guarantee its eventual publication, and the reminder that it is much more difficult to come up with a worthy manuscript than abstract!