A survey of the publication history of randomly selected IADR/AADR abstracts presented in 1983 and 1984

IADR/AADR abstracts of research projects to be presented at the Annual Meeting are published each year in the Journal of Dental Research. An assumption often made is that the ma-terial in these abstracts is subsequently published as journal articles. The validity of this assumption was assessed in this study. Following a review of the literature to establish study criteria, the specific objectives of this study were to determine: (1) the percentage of IADR/AADR abstracts subsequently pub-lished as articles, (2) the length of time from abstract to pub-and article. Ten percent of the IADR/AADR abstracts from the years 1983 (n = 125) and 1984 (n = 150) were randomly selected and surveyed for their publication history. Major ref-erence sources were checked for determination of whether ar-ticles had resulted from the abstracts. Of the 1983-1984 abstracts surveyed, the results indicated that more abstracts were not published (78.5 % in 1983/76.0 % in 1984) than were published (21.6 % in 1983/24.0 % in 1984). Of those articles previously published as abstracts, the greatest number (44.4 % in 1983/ 47.2 % in 1984) were published within ten to 21 months fol-lowing presentation. The greatest amount of discrepancy be-tween the abstract and the article involved names and numbers of authors, titles, purpose statements, and results/conclusions. In other health disciplines, the percentage of abstracts subse-quently published as articles ranged from 31.1 % to 53.9%. Since a smaller percentage of the IADR/AADR abstracts sur-veyed in this study were ultimately published (21.6 % to 24%), IADR/AADR should consider various strategies to improve the quality of abstracts and their accessibility