Publication Rates for Abstracts Presented at the British Association of Plastic Surgeons Meetings: How Do We Compare with Other Specialties?

We present a retrospective study of the publication rates of articles presented to five meetings of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons between 1995 and 1999. The PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/) was searched using the presenter's name and key words from the abstract. Publication rates varied from 23% for the Winter Meeting of 1999 to 54% for the Winter Meeting of 1997. The mean time lag from presentation to publication varied between 13 and 25 months (range: 1-46 months). These results are comparable to those found in some other medical specialties.