Publication rate of paper and podium presentations from the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society Annual Meeting

The Cervical Spine Research Society Europe (CSRS-E) promotes that everyone involved in the cure and care of patients suffering from any disorder of the cervical spine has knowledge of the basics of the treatment of disorders of the cervical spine (from a surgeons’ perspective) to give patients the best treatment possible. The CSRS Europe facilitates the dissemination of knowledge of new, scientifically proven developments in this field.

The annual meeting of the CSRS-es offers a podium for those researchers dedicated to discussion of research relating to exclusively the cervical spine. In order to keep a high quality level of the meetings, abstracts submitted to the CSRS annual meeting are subjected to blinded peer-review by the Scientific Program Committee. This committee consists of members of the board of the CSRS-es who are specialized in cervical spine surgery and research. Abstracts selected for podium or paper presentations are deemed to be of high quality and impact.

The goal of scientific meetings is to share research findings and offer a podium for scientific debate. Preferably, research findings that are not published (yet) are presented and discussed. This not only serves as a platform for researchers to update their knowledge on several topics, but it also offers the presenting authors some kind of ‘peer-review’ prior to preparing the results for publication. Ideally, the results presented at the scientific meeting should be optimized with the comments and be published as a full-text article in scientific journals.

The strength of a meeting may be assessed by the rate of the subsequent full-text peer-reviewed publication of the abstracts presented. Therefore, several authors investigated the publication rate of the presented papers during meetings (Table 1). Likewise, the American section of the Cervical Spine Research Society (CSRS-US) published a paper on publication rates of paper presentations in Spine in May 2015 [1]. This inspired us to assess what percentage of abstracts accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the CSRS Europe resulted in publications in peer-reviewed journals. The abstracts of the CSRS-es annual meetings of 2007–2012 were evaluated for publication.

The presentation abstracts (podium and poster) from the 2007 to 2012 CSRS Europe annual meetings were evaluated. For each abstract, a PubMed search was performed up to July 2015 to determine whether a full-text publication was present. Searches included the names of the authors and key words derived from the title of the study. If a match was not found, it was assumed that the article was not published in a MEDLINE-indexed journal. Abstracts were considered published if the data presented at the meeting were identical to that in the publication. A minimal follow-up period of 3 years was chosen since prior studies suggested that the majority of full-length articles were to be published within this time frame [2]. The number of abstracts that had led to a full text publication in a peer reviewed journal was scored and divided by the total number of abstracts that were accepted in that year, which led to the publication rate in that particular year. We did so for the abstracts accepted for oral presentation and poster presentation separately.

The CSRS-E has an annual meeting that serves as a podium for discussion of high standard research concerning the cervical spine. This is reflected by a publication rate of 42 % for podium presentations between 2007 and 2012, and a mean impact factor of the journals the abstracts were published in of 2.2. In comparison to publication rates of other European meetings (Table 1), this percentage is at the high end of the spectrum.

The CSRS-US meetings reported an overall publication rate of 66 % for podium presentations submitted between 2007 and 2011 [1]. In general, the publication rates of US meetings are higher than the publication rates of European meetings [5]. It can be hypothesized that the contributions of authors to their congresses are of a higher level, leading to a higher chance of being published. The CSRS-US meeting has more attendants and more abstracts sent in [5]; this can lead to a higher quality of the abstracts that are elected for podium presentation. The majority of full-text published articles from the current overview were accepted in Spine (26 %), the European Spine Journal (26 %), The Journal of Spine Disorders and Techniques (10 %), and The Journal of Neurosurgery Spine (8 %). Only one of these is a European Spine Journal.

The mean impact factor of the articles that were published in peer-reviewed journals was 2.2, which is high in comparison to the mean impact factor reported by overviews of other European spine congress accepted abstracts (Table 1). Where the publication rate reflects the scientific value of the presented abstracts, the impact factor reflects the measure of attractiveness of the presented knowledge for a broad audience. For research focusing on the cervical spine, which in general is interesting to only a limited audience, this is a remarkable result.

As expected, the overall publication rate for oral presentations was higher that that for poster presentations, in line with the findings of Patel [2]. This is due to the selection process of the Scientific Program Committee that elects the highest quality abstracts for oral presentation. Those high quality abstracts are more likely to pass the peer-review for publication by scientific journals.

Observing the origin of the abstracts selected for presentations in the CSRS-es annual meeting it is noticed that a lot of abstracts originate from non-European countries. The origin of the research work did however not effectuate the publication rate.

A limitation to this study is that the reason that an abstract did not result in a peer-reviewed publication is not known to the authors of the current paper. It is presumed that at some point in the publication process, the authors stopped their efforts to get the results published. If we assess the strength of a meeting by the rate of the subsequent full-text peer-reviewed publication of the abstracts presented, the whereabouts of this process are preferably known in the determination of the publication rate. Some congress organizations offer the presenters of abstracts to send the full-text article to a particular journal. This logically increases the publication rate, though it does not mean that the full-text paper is published automatically.

The abstracts that are elected in the peer-review process of the program committee to be presented in the CSRS Europe meeting were esteemed to be of considerable interest to the audience. It is conceivable that the program committee will offer their assistance to future presenters to have their results published in full-text peer-reviewed journals. This would lead to the offering of this research work to a broader audience, which presumably lifts cervical spine research to a higher level.

In conclusion, the publication rate for the CSRS Europe abstracts of the 2007–2012 annual meetings was 42 % for the oral presentations and 28 % for the poster presentations. Apparently, the manuscripts were published in for spinal surgeons very attractive journals in which landmark papers are generally published. This meeting therefore serves as an excellent podium for cervical spine research workers to present and discuss their scientific work.