Fate of Abstracts Presented at the First International Congress of Nephrology and Urology, Tehran, Iran, 2015

Objectives The publication rate of abstracts presented at a scientific congress is considered as an indicator of congress’s scientific quality. This rate is in range of 11% to 78% with an average of 45% in international medical congresses. The current survey aimed to determine the publication rate of the presented abstracts at the first international congress of nephrology and urology (ICNU) in 2015. Methods Data of oral and poster presentations including abstracts’ titles and authors were gathered from the proceeding of the first ICNU, Tehran, Iran, 2015. The presented abstracts were searched in Scopus, PubMed, and ISC (for Persian language published papers). All the abstracts were categorized based on presentation type (oral or poster presentation), topic, study type and design, publication status, time interval between the presentation and the publication date, and the journal publishing the full text of the abstracts. Statistical analysis was done by SPSS (version 18, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results The total number of abstracts accepted at the first ICNU was 210 (63 as oral and 147 as poster). The results showed that 49 out of 210 abstracts were published as full-text articles in indexed journals, giving the overall publication rate of 23.3%. 6 out of 49 published papers were in Persian Language. In this survey, the rate of publication was 41.3% for oral presentations. The abstracts of prospective studies and original articles were more likely to be published in journals. The median time to publication was 5.3 months (range 1 - 12 months). Conclusions Novel ideas and innovative approaches were discussed at the first ICNU, Tehran, Iran, 2015. The 23.3% publication rate found in the current study was lower than the mean publication rate of previous medical congresses. If the presented abstracts in a congress are not published as papers to be available to all, it would be waste of effort and time.