A Practical Guide to Writing and Reviewing Abstracts for Pediatric Academic Meetings.

Abstract

Writing and reviewing abstracts for academic meetings are essential skills for any academic pediatrician. An accurate and reliable peer review process is critical for fair determination of which abstracts are accepted for presentation at these meetings. Unfortunately, studies of abstract review practices across many fields in medicine have found that there is often poor concordance in scores among abstract reviewers,1–5 with some scores being so divergent that they are no different from what would be expected if assigned randomly.6,7 However, several studies have examined the development of abstract and journal article rating criteria and have found that the use of a standardized scoring process is feasible and can lead to better interrater agreement.8–15 The highest levels of interrater reliability occur with the more objective criteria such as those focusing on methods and analysis.3,11,15 The objectives of this commentary are to provide a guide on how to write an abstract for an academic meeting and an example of a structured abstract scoring system with relative weights of importance for the criteria, with the highest weight placed on methods and analysis. We will first discuss the key components that should be present in individual sections of the abstract (title, Background and Objectives, Methods and Analysis, Results, and Conclusions); the components that are part of our abstract scoring system are summarized in Table 1. We will then elaborate on additional criteria that can be incorporated into an abstract scoring system by using examples from the guidelines that have been used by the Academic Pediatric Association (APA) in their mentored abstract review process with fellows for the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meetings since the fall of 2011. The 7-point scale and some of the guidelines were designed based on …