Don't forget the posters! Quality and content variables associated with accepted abstracts at a national trauma meeting.

National and regional surgical meetings represent the key venue in which investigators present research results and a frequent source of continuing medical education for community and academic-based providers.1,2 Results from the presented research are often reprinted in the lay press, allowing results to reach thousands more nonattendees and in some cases, the public. Because of this potential for such “high-profile” dissemination, research selected for presentation should be of the highest scientific merit and research quality. Despite this, abstracts submitted to societal meetings typically do not undergo the same critical peer review as published manuscripts. Many academic societies do not have formal qualifications for abstract reviewers nor do they publish standardized reviewing or selection criteria. The most frequently used quality measure of a meeting’s scientific merit has been the number of abstracts presented that go on to peer-reviewed publication. A number of authors have described the publication rates for abstracts presented at national and international meetings, reporting proportions of 23% to 55% with publication delays of 12 months to 28 months.3–5 It is possible that these low publication rates indicate a lack of methodological quality in presented abstracts that do not ultimately stand up to peer review. Rather than basing abstract acceptance on methodological quality, other criteria, such as institutional affiliation and authorship, may play a role in selection. In addition, it is possible that particularly “hot” clinical topics are preferentially selected without particular attention to research methodology. A lack of methodological scrutiny can provide seriously flawed research the opportunity to attain a high-profile platform. It is also possible that such flaws are detected in manuscript review and result in the work not being published. We sought to describe the level of methodological detail reported in the abstracts presented at a major, national and international surgical meeting. We hypothesized that accepted abstracts would rate high on the key methodological factors selected and we further hypothesized that oral presentations would rate higher than poster presentations.