Publication Rate and Impact Factor for Society of Military Orthopedic Surgeons. Annual Meeting Presentations, 2009-2013.

Introduction: The Society of Military Orthopaedic Surgeons (SOMOS) is a robust academic organization with more than 1,000 members and has held annual academic scientific meetings since 1958. Currently, there is a paucity of data regarding the volume and quality of orthopaedic surgery presentations accepted for peer-reviewed publication. The purpose of this study was to answer the following questions: (1) What is the publication acceptance rate for abstract presented at SOMOS meetings? (2) What is the distribution by orthopaedic subspecialty for SOMOS presentations accepted for publication? (3) What is the overall quality of these publications?

Materials And Methods: Abstracts of podium presentations at SOMOS were reviewed from 2009 to 2013. Author institutional information was obtained. Abstracts were then queried in PubMed to obtain publication status, time to publication, and impact factor of the journal in which the manuscript was successfully published.

Results: From 2009 to 2013, 592 abstracts were presented at the SOMOS conference. Overall, 59% of abstracts went on to publication at a mean of 18.1 months. Published manuscripts appeared in 59 journals with a mean impact factor of 2.6. The subspecialties of spine (67%) and basic science (66%) achieved the highest abstract publication rate while sports had the highest mean impact factor (3.3).

Conclusions: The annual SOMOS meeting is a productive academic event, producing quality presentations resulting in a high manuscript publication rate in every orthopaedic surgery subspecialty. This is the first series to demonstrate overall productivity of a general orthopaedic surgery scientific meeting as well as the subspecialty-specific impact factors of published investigations.