Peer Review of Abstracts Submitted to An Internal Medicine National Meeting: Is It a Predictor of Future Publication?

Excerpt

Scientific meetings are often the first step to sharing new research, but journal publication of that research is vital for dissemination. Prior studies are mixed about what specific factors are associated with subsequent high-impact publication of abstracts submitted to scientific meetings.1^,2 While peer review by medical journals is reasonably successful in selecting high-impact articles,3^,4 the evidence is less clear for peer review of abstracts, which contain less information and are potentially more difficult to assess. In addition, abstract reviewers for scientific meetings often have 10–20 diverse submissions to review. Peer review of the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) meeting submissions has demonstrated internal consistency for clinical vignettes,5 but poor interrater reliability for scientific abstracts.6 In this study, we hypothesized that abstract acceptance predicts eventual publication and that those publications will have higher impact compared to publications resulting from rejected abstracts. …