Publication Incidence of Abstracts Presented at the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons Meeting

Purpose
The quality of national society conferences is often indirectly assessed by the full-text publication rate of the abstracts presented. The purpose of this study was to assess the full-text journal publication rate of abstracts presented at the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons conferences from 2010 to 2014 and determine the publication plateau best suited for the analysis.
Materials and Methods
In this retrospective cohort study, all presented abstracts from 2010 to 2014 were compiled using the published educational summaries and outlines from the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery website. PubMed and Google Scholar searches were conducted to identify full-text journal publications. The predictor was abstract type (oral vs poster), and the outcome variable was time to publication. Descriptive, bivariate, and regression analyses were calculated; P < .05 was considered significant.
Results
A total of 1,053 abstracts were presented at the conferences. The full-text journal publication frequency was 34.6% (119 of 344) for oral abstracts and 26.2% (187 of 709) for posters. The incidence 24 months after presentation was 74% and 81%, respectively. A comparison of the proportions of published abstracts showed significantly higher conversion for oral presentations. The median time to publication was 12.5 months (mean, 15.7 months; range, 0 to 52 months) and 12 months (mean, 14 months; range, 0 to 53.5 months) for oral and poster abstracts, respectively. A Kaplan-Meier analysis showed no significant difference in time to publication between the presentation types (hazard ratio, 1.2; 95% confidence interval, 0.9 to 1.5; P = .14). Within 2 years of the respective conference, only 78.4% of published abstracts (240 of 306) successfully navigated the peer-review process compared with 93.1% (285 of 306) within 3 years of the conference.
Conclusions
The publication incidence of abstracts presented was higher for oral presentations; however, posters had a shorter time to publication. Of those published, a large proportion were published between 2 and 3 years after presentation, suggesting that a minimum 3-year publication plateau should be used for future analyses.