A descriptive analysis of abstracts presented at the Turkish National Cardiology Congresses between 2011 and 2015

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the scientific publication performance of the abstracts presented at the annual Turkish National Cardiology Congress (TNCC) between 2011 and 2015 and to analyze the variables associated with publication. METHODS: The accepted abstracts of five congresses (2011-2015) were screened using the title and names of all authors in English via PubMed and Google Scholar databases. The parameters recorded included presentation type, publication rate, time to publication, affiliated institution, journal name and average impact factor, and average citation number per year for each publication. RESULTS: A total of 2897 abstracts (966 oral presentations and 1931 poster presentations) were accepted in five meetings and 23.4% (n=680) of these were published in national or international peer-reviewed journals. Of the published articles, 32.6% (n=222) were oral presentations and 67.4% (n=458) were poster presentations. The mean time to publication of oral and poster presentations were similar [9 (0-58) vs. 8 (0-62) months, p = 0.150]. According to the type of institution, university hospitals had the highest ratio of publication (58.6%) (p<0.001). All publications were published in 148 journals from 37 different countries. The average citation number of publications was significantly higher than the average impact factor of the journals [1.4 (0-30.1) vs. 1.29 (0.11-19.8), p<0.001]. CONCLUSION: Compared with other national-based literature in other medical fields, the overall publication rate was found to be similar while the time to publication was shorter. The significant difference between citation number and impact factor may be interpreted as positive indicator in terms of high level scientific value for cardiology publications presented in the TNCC.