Publication of Research Presented at STFM and NAPCRG Conferences

Post and colleagues' 1 update to Elder and Blake's work2 on the conversion rate of scholarly presentations to peer-reviewed journal articles provides a vital and necessary periodic benchmark for research directors in departments of Family Medicine, and the time lapse between the two studies is probably far too large. As it stands, however, there is probably both a caveat to the most recent study that should be made, as well as a structural lesson that we, as a field, can take from this work.

One major caveat to the findings presented by Post is the assumption that all conference submissions are created equal. Conference abstracts for both the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) and for the Society for Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) include not only completed research projects, but other sorts of presentations, such as methodological workshops and discussions. Additionally, while the aim of the NAPCRG annual meeting is generally to disseminate research, STFM has typically been more focused on exchanges of teaching methods. This observation appears to be realized in the fact that both oral presentations as well as posters presented at NAPCRG are significantly more likely to be published than those at STFM.1 Finally, for both conferences, most presentation categories do not require the submission of a complete research paper. Many presentations may simply not make it to publication for a variety of reasons related to the quality of the work, as opposed to some lack of support or motivation for seeing the process through to publication. In short, if one were to look only at work that was 1) intended for eventual publication, and 2) that was of sufficient quality to warrant publication, then the rates of publication might be very acceptable, and a product of the peer review process at work.

The structural lesson I believe we can take from this work is that a system for tracking presentation-to-publication pathways ought to be in place. Since the author list may change order and/or membership between presentation and paper, and because a single presentation may be accounted for by multiple (differently-titled) papers (or vice-versa), it may be a worthwhile venture to establish a query during the submission process for both conferences, as well as for the main Family Medicine journals, as to where the work being submitted has been previously presented or published. Aside from facilitating more regular analyses of presentation-to- publication rates, this would also potentially be of use in pulling presentations out of the "gray literature" zone for systematic reviews, and would help connect what might appear to be multiple studies derived from the same data. This, combined with the type of analysis conducted by Post and colleagues, and surveys of membership (such as through CERA3), would lead to much better benchmarks for research directors to use in estimating an acceptable "yield," in terms of academic output, from support for expensive conference participation.

1. Post RE, Mainous AG, O'Hare KE, King DE, Maffei MS. Publication of Research Presented at STFM and NAPCRG Conferences. Annals of family medicine. 2013;11(3):258-61. doi:10.1370/afm.1503.

2. Elder NC, Blake RL. Publication patterns of presentations at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and North American Primary Care Research Group annual meetings. Family medicine. 1994;26(6):352-5. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8050655. Accessed May 31, 2013.

3. Shokar N, Bergus G, Bazemore A, et al. Calling all scholars to the council of academic family medicine educational research alliance (CERA). Annals of family medicine. 2011;9(4):372-3. doi:10.1370/afm.1283.

Competing interests:   None declared