The publication rates of abstracts presented at the Turkish Respiratory Society (TUSAD) annual congress: adequate or not?

Objective: In this study, we aimed to determine the publication status of the abstracts presented at the Turkish Respiratory Society Congress between 2011 and 2014. Methods: The abstracts were classified according to presentation type (oral presentations, poster discussion, etc.), study type, study design, topic, publication status, time interval between the presentation and the publication date, and the journal in which the article was published. The conversion rate of presentations into full-text articles in peer-reviewed journals were surveyed through Elsevier's Scopus. Results: The total number of abstracts submitted in the congress was 2009. In terms of study type, the majority of abstracts were case reports (56.4%) and the remainder was original research. Totally, 179 abstracts were published in an indexed journal with an overall publication rate of 8.9%. 18.3% of oral presentations were converted into full-text article. Publication rates according to study types were 14.8% for original researches and 4.4% for case reports. The first three subspecialties with the highest publication rates were sleep related breathing disorders (16.9%), interventional pulmonology (16.7%) and pleural diseases (15.2%). Median publication/acceptance time was 8.0 months (0-38). Conclusion: This is the first study evaluating the publication rates of abstracts presented in a respiratory congress. Although the number of presented abstracts in the congress increased year by year, prominently in the case reports, over all conversion rates were decreased. We put forward that encouraging the authors to conduct higher-quality investigations would raise the publication rate as well as improve the scientific quality of congress.