title: Publication outcome of abstracts presented at the AACC annual meeting.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Failure to publish study results causes duplication of effort and is a significant source of waste. It also can lead to distortions in the evidence base that can lead to misallocation of resources and medical harm. Failure to publish is commonly studied by comparing the conversion rate of meeting abstracts or publication rate of registered trials and has not been studied in clinical chemistry. The objective of this study was to determine the abstract conversion rate in clinical chemistry.
  
  
  METHODS
  For the set of abstracts published from the 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, we determined which converted to full publications and which had not. We used 3 methods to match publications to abstracts: 1) a survey sent to corresponding authors of abstracts, 2) a web scrape of Google Scholar, and PubMed, and 3) a manual search using Scopus. Publication rates were compared by topic, country of corresponding author, institution type, and award recognition.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Matching publications were found for 38% (95% CI: 34-42%) of the abstracts. The acceptance rate for submitted manuscripts was 34% (95% CI: 28-43%) among those who responded to the survey. Publication rates varied by topic (range 13% to 59%); rates from academic institutions were higher than commercial institutions (42% vs 16%, p<0.001). The publication rate of abstracts recognized "with distinction" was significantly greater than the publication rate of non-winners (68% vs 37%, p=0.001).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A significant proportion of abstracts presented at the AACC national meeting are not followed by full publication.
authors.affiliation: Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States.
authors.forename: Dina N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Greene
authors.affiliation: School of Nursing, University of Utah Health Sciences Center, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.affiliation: Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah Health Sciences Center, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
authors.forename: Nicole M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Bailey
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology and ARUP Laboratories, University of Utah Health Sciences Center, Salt Lake City, UT, United States. Electronic address: Robert.schmidt@hsc.utah.edu.
authors.forename: Robert L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Schmidt
mesh_terms: D002624:Chemistry, Clinical; D003226:Congresses as Topic; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012958:Societies, Scientific; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires