An observational study of duplicate presentation rates between two national orthopedic meetings.

National meetings are invaluable in facilitating the dissemination of new research findings to a wide audience. The annual meetings of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) and the Canadian Orthopaedic Association (COA) are 2 nationally prominent meetings that serve as platforms for the timely presentation of current research findings. AAOS typically receives over 3200 abstracts, and COA, over 375 for a given meeting. Given their respective agendas, time for presentation of original research is limited, and only a small proportion of submitted research papers (27% at AAOS and 40% at COA) can ultimately be selected for either podium or poster presentation. Clearly, the goal of most researchers is to publish the results of their investigation in the highest-impact peer-reviewed journals; however the peer review, editorial and publishing process at these leading journals results in a lag of up to 2 years between completion of the study and circulation of the printed version in a journal. Nationally prominent meetings such as AAOS and COA provide an opportunity to communicate important research findings to the orthopedic community in a timely manner, receive valuable feedback from peers and enable the submission of a higher-quality manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal. Given the limited opportunity for investigators to present their work, presenting the same paper at more than 1 meeting has several potential disadvantages: it prevents the dissemination of other potentially important studies, denies other investigators the same opportunity to receive valuable feedback for their current and future studies, and risks providing a program in which attendees have already seen the papers and posters, which are no longer new information. Advocates of duplicate presentation may believe this practice is necessary to ensure a wider audience than would be available at either meeting alone. This argument is based on a belief that audiences at AAOS and COA meetings are different. However, this assumption may not hold between AAOS and subspecialty orthopedic meetings held in the USA. The extent of duplicate presentation of podium papers and posters between AAOS and COA remains unknown. Additionally, rates of duplicate presentation between AAOS and subspecialty meetings remain largely unreported. Therefore, we conducted an observational study to determine the incidence of duplicate presentation of research between recent meetings of COA and AAOS. We also aimed to determine whether rates of duplicate presentation were similar between AAOS and subspecialty orthopedic meetings within the same country.