title: Plenary presentations and public citations from The American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  We examined the impact of work presented in the plenary sessions at the meeting of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS), by determining how frequently the published papers corresponding to the session presentations during the past 20 years, were cited; those that were most cited were identified.
  
  
  METHODS
  We reviewed the AATS meeting programs from the 20-year period from 1994 to 2014 and identified the corresponding publications in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (JTCVS) from all abstracts presented at the plenary sessions. Papers were categorized as cardiac, thoracic, or congenital. References were evaluated for subsequent citation in the Web of Science (WoS), and Google Scholar (GS). We determined both the median number of citations overall, and per year. For comparison, we evaluated numbers of citations in WoS from current JTCVS papers in issues containing the 3 most-cited plenary session papers.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Among 195 published plenary papers, the median number of citations in WoS and GS was 49 and 76, respectively. The median total number of citations in WoS was as follows: 51 for cardiac-category papers (n = 105); 61 for thoracic (n = 55), and 41 for congenital (n = 35). These values were higher than the median total number of citations for contemporary nonplenary JTCVS papers: cardiac (22, n = 55; P < .001); thoracic (31.5, n = 8; P = .183); and congenital (15.5, n = 24; P = .002) papers published in JTCVS. The median number of citations per year since publication for plenary publications was 5.9 (cardiac), 6 (thoracic), and 3.7 (congenital), respectively.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Publications corresponding to the plenary sessions of the AATS are highly cited and include some of the seminal studies in our field in the past 20 years.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Mohamed
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kamel
authors.affiliation: Department of General Surgery, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Yusuke
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Terasaki
authors.affiliation: Thoracic Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Prasad S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Adusumilli
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY. Electronic address: brs9035@med.cornell.edu.
authors.forename: Brendon M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Stiles
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D003226:Congresses as Topic / Q000266:history / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000266:history / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011643:Publishing / Q000266:history / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012955:Societies, Medical / Q000266:history / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013038:Specialization / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: AATS; citation; plenary sessions