Abstract
to assess the conversion rate of Plastic Surgery meeting abstract presentations to full manuscript publications and examine factors associated with this conversion. we assessed the abstracts presented at the 47th and 48th Brazilian Congresses of Plastic Surgery by cross-referencing with multiple databases. We analyzed the Abstracts' characteristics associated with full manuscript publications. of the 200 abstracts presented, 50 abstracts were subsequently published in full, giving the conference a conversion rate of 25%. The mean time to publish was 15.00±13.75 months. In total, there were 4.93±1.63 authors per abstract and 67.8±163 subjects per abstract; 43.5% of the abstracts were of retrospective studies; 69% comprised the plastic surgery topics head and neck, and chest and trunk, and 88.5% had no statistical analysis. Overall, 80% of the manuscripts were published in plastic surgery journals, 76% had no impact factor and 52% had no citations. Bivariate and multivariate analyses revealed the presence of statistical analysis to be the most significant (p<0.05) predictive factor of conversion of abstracts into full manuscripts. the conversion rate found from this bibliometric research appeared a bit lower than the conversion trend of international plastic surgery meetings, and statistical analysis was a determinant of conversion success.
Highlights
Brazil’s scientific production has increased substantially, reaching an average growth rate of 10.7% per year[1]
Full manuscript publication search We identified the publications in peerreviewed journals by a standardized searching of the Medline (PubMed), ISI Web of Knowledge, SciELO, Lilacs, and Google Scholar databases through March 2015
Acceptance of an abstract by a scientific meeting is prestigious, ideally abstracts should be followed by a full manuscript publication in peerreviewed journals for several reasons: key novel findings and useful information should be available to the general scientific community who did not participate in the meetings; abstracts alone have many defects, inaccuracies, and only preliminary data; abstracts have been devoid of information that is needed for evaluating validity and reliability; and abstracts are accepted for presentations without a peer-review process or have been reviewed less thoroughly than what is typical of journal manuscripts[18,19]
Summary
Brazil’s scientific production has increased substantially, reaching an average growth rate of 10.7% per year[1]. A continuous analysis of the conversion rate should be performed to encourage members of each academic society to publish full manuscripts[2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. In this context, there has been no data about the conversion rate from Brazilian Plastic Surgery meetings, international Plastic Surgery meetings have been analyzed[9,10,11,12,13]. The purposes of this quantitative, descriptive, bibliometric study were to assess the conversion rate of Brazilian plastic surgery meeting abstracts into full peer-reviewed, indexed manuscripts and to examine possible predicting factors of this conversion. We hypothesized that despite increased diffusion of the necessity of full manuscript publications within the Brazilian plastic surgery community[14,15], the conversion rate after Brazilian plastic surgery meeting presentations would be inferior than the international plastic surgery trends[9,10,11,12,13]
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