Fate of abstracts presented at the annual scientific meeting of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society.
BACKGROUND
The full-text publication of abstracts presented at any given scientific meeting in peer-reviewed journals is accepted as a measure of scientific quality of that particular meeting. The aim of this study is to determine the full-text publication rate of abstracts presented at the 2005 Scientific Meeting of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS).


METHODS
We identified the scientific abstracts presented at the 2005 UHMS meeting and searched the PubMed database (June 2005 to July 2010) for their corresponding full-text publication. We recorded the following parameters for each of the abstracts: number of authors, number of centers involved in the study, statistical methods used, country of origin of the study, study type, and subject of the abstract. We recorded the time to publication and the title of the journal if the abstract had been published in a peer-reviewed journal.


RESULTS
Overall, we identified 187 abstracts presented at the 2005 UHMS meeting. Two of the abstracts were excluded from the study because they had been retracted from the meeting and six more because they had been already published as full-text articles at the time the meeting was held. Of the 179 abstracts, 62 (34.6%) were published as full-text articles within the succeeding five years. The mean (+/- SD) time to publication was 18.5 (+/- 13.6) months. Multivariate analysis with logistic regression identified "country of origin" and "the subject of the abstract" as independent predictors of full-text publication.


CONCLUSIONS
We found that only one-third of the abstracts presented at the 2005 UHMS meeting were published as full-text articles within the succeeding five years. Although this rate is consistent with similar studies from various disciplines, further research is needed to identify the specific barriers to full-text publication of abstracts in the field of underwater and hyperbaric medicine.
Department of Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine, Gulhane Military Medical Academy Haydapaşa Teaching Hospital, 34668 Istanbul, Turkey. gunalpuzun@gmail.com
Günalp
G
Uzun
Mesut
M
Mutluoğlu
Alev
A
Bakir
Mustafa S
MS
Senocak
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015706:Bibliometrics; D003226:Congresses as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004242:Diving / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006931:Hyperbaric Oxygenation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012955:Societies, Medical