This study provides baseline scholastic output data for a medical specialty organization state chapter abstract competition, showing that 3.8% of projects further developed into a peer-reviewed manuscript and a total of 14.7% of student and resident presentations developed further to reach larger scholarly audiences (meeting either primary or secondary outcome). Given the paucity of reports in the literature with similar context (i.e. State level, medical specialty organizations, & include clinical vignette abstracts), these data provide a baseline for future study and comparison.
A 2018 Cochrane meta-analysis on the full publication of results initially presented as abstracts, reports that 37.4% of abstracts progress onto a full publication (Scherer et al., 2018). Our observed rate of 3.8% is nearly an order of magnitude less than that. We hypothesize that this difference is a multifactorial. First, abstracts being presented at a national or international meeting compared to a state level abstract introduces a selection bias that selects for projects of higher “quality” or “impact” which has been associated with increased rates of publication (Scherer et al., 2018). Additionally, our observed publication rate includes all abstracts presented, while other researchers may omit studying publication rates of clinical vignette abstracts as part of their protocol (Egloff et al., 2017). Authors attempting to publish case reports (clinical vignettes) have several added barriers to publication compared to other research styles including lack of mentoring, fewer journals accepting case reports, and publication fees (Nissen and Wynn, 2012; Li, Wilson and Lau, 2019).
Another finding from this study showed that abstracts with students as primary author were more likely to progress onto wider dissemination. We believe that this difference is most driven by higher a higher proportion of clinical vignette submissions by residents (Students, 57 of 79 = 72.2%; Residents, 315 of 344 = 91.6%). As discussed above, case reports have added barriers to publication compared to clinical or bench research. Additionally, this disproportion is being driven by similar absolute numbers of ACP National Presentations among students and residents, but dissimilar proportions given more total abstract submissions by residents. Notably, the sponsoring organization (American College of Physicians) national abstract competition was the only additional scholarly output for over half of the projects (32/62= 51.6%). We attribute this high proportion to the low barrier to submit to the national meeting given similar abstract formats and the fact that a small number of winning abstracts are given immediate acceptance to the national contest. These data highlight the importance of linking state & regional meetings with larger national meetings to support learner scholarship.
Limitations of this study include the potential that search criteria may not return all relevant publications; especially If abstract titles are different enough from subsequent publication titles such as in cases where the authors use word-play in their abstract titles. Additionally, our search was complete 12 months after the most recent annual meeting. Effectively, this provided a follow-up period from time to presentation to analysis of 12 to 48 months depending on competition year. Previous studies have used a minimum of 24 months follow up as this is generally regarded as the window in which most abstracts will be published (Scherer et al., 2018). To monitor for effect of a shortened follow-up window, an ad-hoc Chi-Square analysis of abstracts meeting primary or secondary outcome by year showed no significant relation from time since presentation to wider dissemination (p=0.325).