Publication rate of abstracts orally presented at the Turkish Society of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation National Congresses.

Objective: The most widely accepted parameter in evaluating the quality of research presented at scientific congresses is the success of publishing that research in a peer-reviewed journal. There are limited data in the literature about the publishing rates of abstracts orally presented at national congresses of the Turkish Society of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation (TARD) in scientific journals. The aim of the present study was to investigate the literary contribution of oral presentations at the TARD Congresses (TARK) and to present proposals for future congresses with detailed evaluation of the literature.

Methods: Overall, 319 orally presented abstracts at the TARK between October 2011 and October 2014 have been reviewed in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Abstracts were evaluated with respect to the institution of the principal author, type of research, publication status in scientific journal, type of publication, year of publication, rate of citation, order of authors and changes in title.

Results: The distributions of investigated papers were as follows: 73.1% clinical research, 21.9% experimental research, 2.5% case presentations and 2.5% survey studies. Moreover, 57.7% of the abstracts had authors from universities, 16% from research-training hospitals and 26.3% from mixed institutions. Further, 42.3% of the abstracts were published as articles in a scientific journal, 65.9% of the manuscripts were published in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) indexed, 8.1% in non-SCIE indexed international journals and 25.9% in national journals. There was no statistically significant difference between institution from which publications were sent and the index status of the journal (p=0.068). The average publication time of the abstracts was 15.01±12.26 months.

Conclusion: The publication rate of abstracts orally presented at the TARK between October 2011 and October 2014 is 42.3%, which is in accordance with other international studies. This indicates that the reports in the congresses were assessed by the jury according to international selection criteria and meticulously scored. The majority of the abstracts were published in journals that are listed in SCIE, indicating a quantitative data regarding the scientific quality of research in anaesthesiology.