Fate of abstracts submitted to the 2004 EASD Annual Meeting in Munich

Excerpt

In recent years about 18,000 clinicians and scientists have attended the EASD Annual Meeting. The advantage of participating in such a conference is that original research is presented long before the results are published. However, because the review process for submitted abstracts is less stringent than that for full-length articles, some doubts remain as to the validity of the abstracts’ methodology and conclusions [1]. Therefore, it is mandatory to assess the quality of presentations selected for medical conferences. The basis of this quality assessment is the publication rate of accepted and rejected abstracts and the impact of the publications resulting from presentations. Whereas some comparable academic societies recently published evaluations of their conference abstracts [2‐5], for the EASD and ADA the publication rate of abstracts as full-length papers has only been evaluated for a small sample of abstracts presented at meetings held in 1992 [6]. The aim of our study was to evaluate the efficacy of the EASD abstract review system using subsequent publication success as the outcome and to compare these results with evaluations of other conferences. …