[553] The Outcome of USCAP Abstracts

J Song, DH Hwang, RW Ricciotti, M Li, A Chang. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Background: The scientific abstract program of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) annual meeting is an important forum for sharing recent advances in pathology, publishing over 1500 abstracts each year. Abstracts are a valuable source of information; however, full articles in peer-reviewed journals are generally considered to be more accessible and reliable. Knowing the outcome of published abstracts is of interest to both meeting organizers and attendees. The goal of our study is to analyze the outcome of USCAP abstracts in recent years.
Design: USCAP abstracts for the 2005 to 2007 annual meetings were downloaded from Modern Pathology, and processed by a PERL computer program. For each abstract, it searched PubMed with the first and last authors, within a 3-year date range starting from the October prior to USCAP meeting (abstract submission deadline). We then manually reviewed the research results to accept articles that are true matches, and to reject those unrelated to or not consistent with their query abstracts. This review process was greatly facilitated by the program that highlighted all matched keywords, and sorted articles by their likelihood of being true matches.
Results: Overall, 36% (1725/4824) of USCAP abstracts from 2005 to 2007 resulted in publication in peer-reviewed journals. The publication rates for various subspecialties are listed in Table 1. The top five journals with largest number of publications are: Am J Surg Pathol (16.2%), Modern Pathol (9.1%), Am J Clin Pathol (8.3%), Human Pathol (5.7%) and Arch Pathol Lab Med (4.0%). The average time from abstract to publication was 18.7 months, with 25% published in the first year.

Table 1: Publication rate of USCAP abstracts by subspecialty.

Subspecialty \ Year	2005 (%)	2006 (%)	2007 (%)
Autopsy	10	21	12
Bone & Soft Tissue	48	42	38
Breast	36	27	32
Cardiovascular	60	38	37
Cytopathology	37	32	34
Dermatopathology	57	32	48
Endocrine	38	28	41
Gastrointestinal	38	34	37
Genitourinary	36	37	40
Gynecologic	38	40	34
Head & Neck	47	43	29
Hematopathology	46	42	36
Infections	40	47	38
Kidney	41	34	37
Liver & Pancreas	35	31	31
Neuropathology	30	41	28
Ophthalmic	-	-	43
Pathobiology	41	36	31
Pediatrics	62	33	43
Pulmonary	26	26	23
Quality Assurance	31	25	23
Techniques	33	33	27
Ultrastructural	25	25	18

Conclusions: The publication rate of USCAP abstracts is comparable with other national meetings with published data, such as American Urological Association. Based on these data, more than half of the abstracts may never lead to full publications in peer-review journals.
Category: Education

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 9:30 AM

Poster Session III # 106, Tuesday Morning