Abstract
Background
Presentations at national meetings provide an important forum to relay research findings in all areas of Orthopaedic surgery. Orthopaedic surgical trainees are encouraged throughout the training process to participate, present and ultimately publish their research. Indeed the well known mantra ‘Publish or Perish’ signifies the pressure trainees are sometimes placed under in order to achieve professional success. The number of original published papers is often the yardstick by which professional appointments are made. We aimed to determine the overall publication rates of presentations from the 2001 and 2002 Irish Orthopaedic Association meetings and to determine whether publication rates differed among other national Orthopaedic meetings and amongst the subspecialties.
Methods
A comprehensive literature review was conducted using the proceedings of the 2002 & 2003 IOA meetings using Pubmed and Medline. Time to publication, orthopaedic subspecialty and journal was analysed. Rates were compared to other similar studies documenting rates of publication in the AAOS and data compared using Pearsons chi square test.
Results
In 2002 and 2003 there were 63 and 49 presentations respectively. The overall publication rate was 26.98% for 2003 and 24.4% for 2002. All 29 presentations were published in a selection of 20 journals, the most common being the JBJS (Br) and Injury. The most published topics were Basic Science (n=12) followed by Hip/Knee Arthroplasty (n=5). Seventy eight percent of published papers were published within 2 years of presentation. Other recent papers report a presentation to publishing presentation of 36% to 66%.
Conclusions
The rate of publication from presentation in Irish Orthopaedics is poor by international standards (p<0.05). As many presented studies will not pass peer review examination the IOA meeting should not be used as the sole guide to clinical practice.
