title: Apheresis research-more abstracts should be published as full manuscripts to provide more evidence for clinical practice guidelines.
abstract: High-quality evidence to support clinical practice is lacking in apheresis medicine compared to other therapeutic modalities. A potential source of evidence comes from the abstracts submitted to the Annual Meetings of the American Society for Apheresis (ASFA). Therefore, the goal of this study is to determine the proportion of abstracts from the 2005 to 2012 ASFA Annual Meetings that subsequently became PubMed-indexed publications. Furthermore, we sought to determine the factor(s) that were associated with the likelihood of abstracts to be published as full manuscripts. During the 8-year study period, 684 abstracts were available for analysis (median: 82/year, range: 64-118). Most abstracts (74%) were from US institutions, and 67% of first authors were affiliated with academic centers. There were more abstracts (64%) on therapeutic versus donor apheresis (20%) and cellular therapy (16%). Overall, 16% of the abstracts have been published in PubMed-indexed journals, with a median time of 17 months from the ASFA Annual Meeting (range: 1-96 months). Abstracts whose first authors were affiliated with academic institutions were 3.14 times more likely to have been published than abstracts with ones affiliated with an apheresis organization and/or a community hospital. However, neither the first author's location nor the type of apheresis procedure significantly affected the publication rate after adjusting for other covariates. In conclusion, the rate of publication is low and authors should be encouraged to follow their presentations at the meeting with peer-reviewed manuscripts. This change is essential to provide more published evidence for future apheresis practice guidelines. J. Clin. Apheresis 31:353-358, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama.
authors.forename: Huy P
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Pham
authors.affiliation: Center for Family Life at Sunset Park, SCO Family of Services, Brooklyn, New York.
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Zhi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama.
authors.forename: Lance A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama.
authors.forename: Marisa B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Marques
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D001781:Blood Component Removal; D006801:Humans; D063868:Patient Outcome Assessment; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000592:standards; D011642:Publications / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
keywords: abstracts; apheresis; evidence-based; manuscripts; publications