Evaluating medical conferences: the emerging need for a quality metric

Scientific medical conferences have proliferated in recent years but little data are available to assess their effectiveness in achieving their commonly stated aims “to educate, advance science, and establish evidence-based policy”. The recent expansion of what has been labeled ‘predatory academia’ has heightened concerns about the quality of both published and conference “science”. A journal’s impact factor (JIF) became one accepted metric for the quality of publication science, but no such indicator exists for medical scientific conferences, such as a conference impact factor (CIF). To explore the feasibility of implementing a CIF metric for such conferences, we tested a tool that establishes a ranking system to help both attendees and funders identify quality. Using abstracts presented from 2013 to 2016 at an annual meeting (International Workshop on HIV/Hepatitis Observational Databases), we determined how many were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. We then calculated a CIF by dividing the number of peer reviewed published papers by the number of abstracts presented at each conference, then multiplied it by the median value of JIF of the publishing journals. For evaluating the quality of a scientific conference, the use of a CIF which, although limited in scope, can act as a tool for attendees and funders to prioritize their time and resources.