SAT0516 Publication Rates and Features of Pediatric Rheumatology Abstracts: Investigation of Eular 2009 Congress

BackgroundAnnual EULAR congress is one of the biggest events in the field rheumatology. This special event has an additional importance for pediatric rheumatologists this year, because of it will be a joint congress with PReS Congress. As to our knowledge, there is no effort to report full text publication rates of pediatric rheumatology abstracts up to date.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to determine the publication rates of presented abstracts related to pediatric rheumatology in EULAR 2009 congress.MethodsEULAR Abstracts2View site was screened and the abstracts related to pediatric rheumatology from 2009 EULAR Congress were included in the study. Titles and authors of the abstracts were searched systematically in Pubmed, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. Full-text publication rate, the time between presentation and full-text publication, distribution of abstracts and full-texts according to countries and journals were explored. Countries were determined according to first author.ResultsA total of 220 abstracts were determined as related to pediatric rheumatology. Twenty-two of them had only the title, authors' names, and institution of origin, but no body text. Therefore the analysis was conducted over 198 abstracts. Eighty-six (43.4%) abstracts were found as full-text articles. Four abstracts noticed as their full-text publication time was prior to the EULAR Congresses. The time between the presentation in EULAR and the full text publication was determined as mean 23.41 months (1 - 64 months). Italy (34 abstracts), United Kingdom (21 abstracts), Germany (20 abstracts), Turkey (14 abstracts) and Brazil (13 abstracts) were the top countries according to abstract presentation. Italy (17 full-texts), UK (10 full-texts), Brazil (8 full-texts), Germany (8 full-texts) and Turkey (8 full-texts) also were the top countries according to full-text publication. The Journal of Rheumatology (10 abstracts), Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (9 abstracts), Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology (9 abstracts), Arthritis & Rheumatology (7 abstracts) and Rheumatology (7 abstracts) were the journals in which most abstracts were published as full-text articles.ConclusionsIt was advocated that full text publication rates after a congress indicate the scientific value of the congress. Scharer et al. reported full text publication rates of medical abstracts as 44.5% in their Cochrane review. Yılmaz et al. found the publication rate of all abstracts presented in