Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Conversion rates of the presentations into publications could be a measure of the scientific Impact of a conference. The aim of the current study was to determine the publication rates of abstracts presented at the 16th European Congress of Endocrinology (ECE 2014) and the factors affecting these rates by using computer algorithms specially coded for this analysis.

Methods: All presentations of the ECE 2014 were collected with the web scraping – Python coding from official website and converted into the desired formats. Parameters were transformed to Google Scholar and PubMed search links with coding. A special interface was coded to evaluate the results of the three searches on the same screen and to save the results into the database. Web Scraping was coded in Python version 3.4 with the open source code/module BeautifulSoup version 4.4.0. The time frame for publication search was between May 2013 and August 2019.

Results: A total of 1205 abstracts from 71 countries were featured. Among these, 1145 (%95) were poster presentations and 60 (%5) were oral presentations. Subsequently, 341 abstracts (28.3%) were published as a full paper. The conversion rates to publication for oral and poster presentations were 65% and 26.4% respectively (OR : 5.18, 95% CI : 3.0–8.96, P < 0.01). The median time to publication was 12 months (IQR : 2–24 months). Impact Factors (IF) of publications from oral and poster presentations were median IF of 5.0 (IQR : 3.83–5.96), and 2.94 (IQR : 1.77–3.83), respectively (P = 0.01). Median number of citations of publications from oral and poster presentations were 12 (IQR : 6–33) and 6 (IQR : 2–15), respectively (P = 0.01). A total of 90 (7.5%) multi-country abstracts were identified. Multi-country collaborative studies were turned into more publications than single-country studies (OR: 3.91 95% CI : 2.52–6.06, P < 0.01). As of August 2019, a total of 3835 citations to the papers generated from ECE 2014 were identified with a median of 6 (IQR: 2–17) at the Web of Science. The congress potential impact factor was calculated as 3.18.

Conclusion: This first study evaluating the publication outcome of ECE shows that 28.3% of the abstracts presented at the congress are published with 12 months of median time to publication.