Introduction
The presentation of research at annual scientific meetings, such as the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA) Annual Meeting, plays a vital role in the dissemination of new findings, fostering collaboration, and promoting advancements in the field of orthopedic trauma care. While podium presentations often receive primary attention, poster presentations are equally significant, offering a platform for a diverse range of research, including preliminary findings, pilot studies, and innovative methods. However, research acceptance into an annual meeting, whether in poster or podium format, does not guarantee publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Since 1985, the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA) has hosted annual meetings to promote education and research related to musculoskeletal injuries, fostering collaboration among professionals, and showcasing cutting-edge trauma research. Poster presentations often represent high-quality research, and publication of this work into peer-reviewed journals serves as a key metric of its contribution to the broader medical community. Several studies have evaluated the publication rates of both podium and poster presentations at various orthopedic and surgical society meetings. For instance, previous analyses of the OTA Annual Meeting have reported podium presentation publication rates as high as 73% and poster publication rates averaging around 54% during specific time periods (Melvin and Cannada 2020). Understanding the publication trends of posters specifically can help determine the impact of research presented at a meeting and visibility within the field.
The aim of this study is to analyze the publication rates of posters presented at the OTA Annual Meeting from 2017 to 2023. By investigating the number of posters that progressed to full publication in peer-reviewed journals, this study will offer insights into trends over time, contributing to the understanding of poster presentations as a vehicle for disseminating orthopedic trauma research. A secondary aim is to review the number of poster presentations by female authors as a metric of improving diversity within the field of orthopaedic surgery and specifically, orthopaedic trauma.
Methods
Poster presentations from the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA) Annual Meetings from 2017 to 2023 were identified through the OTA website and final program materials. A total of 1,218 posters were included, with international submissions, thesis papers, and abstracts excluded. Posters were categorized into subcategories based on preset conference sections, such as geriatric, pelvis and acetabulum, foot & ankle, tibia, hip and femur, pediatrics, general interest, upper extremity, and more.
A search for publication status was conducted using PubMed (MEDLINE) and Google Scholar databases. Searches were initially performed using the title of the presentation, followed by the presenting author and other authors if necessary. If the poster was one that contributed to larger studies with additional outcomes, it was considered published. Posters with no matching journal article were marked as unpublished.
Data extracted included the title, first author’s last name, gender, publication status, date of publication, time to publication, journal name, open access status, and impact factor (IF). The time from presentation to publication was also calculated.
Results
Between the years 2017 and 2023, a total of 1,186 posters were presented at the OTA annual meetings. The 2020 OTA Annual Meeting was virtual due to the COVID pandemic. The number of posters ranged from a low of 148 in 2019 to a high of 183 in 2021. At the time this study was conducted, 688 of the 1,186 total posters were published in a peer-reviewed journal (58.0%) and 271 of the poster presenters were female (22.8%) (Table 1). The 2018 OTA annual meeting saw the lowest percentage of female presenters (19.5%, n = 29), while the 2023 OTA annual meeting saw the highest percentage of female presenters (30.9%, n = 56). Publication rates of posters ranged from 40.3% (n = 73) in 2023 to 67.6% (n = 100) in 2019.
The time-to-publication analysis only included posters that were published after the OTA meeting of that year. Therefore, of the 688 published posters, 83 were excluded from the time-to-publication analysis due to already being published before they were presented at their respective OTA annual meeting. Of the 605 posters included in this analysis, 47.1% went on to publication within 1 year of the OTA annual meeting of that year (N = 285/605), 79.2% went on to publication within 2 years of the OTA annual meeting of that year (N = 479/605), 90.7% went on to publication within 3 years of the OTA annual meeting of that year (N = 549/605), 97.4% went on to publication within 4 years of the OTA annual meeting of that year (N = 589/605), and 99.0% went on to publication within 5 years of the OTA annual meeting of that year (N = 599/605). In cases where this data was unable to be calculated (such as a 5-year publication rate following the 2022 OTA Annual Meeting), those OTA annual meetings were left out of the data pool.
The top ten journals that published the highest number of posters presented at the 2017-2023 OTA annual meetings were the Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma (n = 218, 31.6%), Injury (n = 77, 11.2%), Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (n = 37, 5.4%), Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (n = 30, 4.4%), OTA International (n = 26, 3.8%), European Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology (n = 20, 2.9%), Orthopedics (n = 19, 2.8%), The Bone and Joint Journal (n = 18, 2.6%), Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (n = 13, 1.9%), and Archives of Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery (n = 13, 1.9%) (Table 2). 217 (31.5%) posters were published in other orthopedic journals.
All posters were divided into one of seventeen available categories (Table 3). The five categories with the highest rate of publication were the following: polytrauma (68.9%, n = 31/45); knee and tibial plateau (67.3%, n = 33/49); spine (66.7%, n = 4/6); foot, ankle, and pilon (63.5%, n = 87/137); and basic science (61.8%, n = 21/34). The five categories with the most poster presentations at the 2017-2023 OTA annual meetings were the following: hip and femur (n = 205); general interest (n = 180); foot, ankle, and pilon (n = 137); upper extremity (n = 119); and pelvis and acetabulum (n = 113).
Time to publication for posters presented at the 2017-2023 OTA Annual Meetings within a five-year period is displayed in Fig 1. The majority of posters presented at each of these annual meetings that were ultimately published did so within a two-year period. Within a two-year period, 67.3% (66/98) of posters presented at the 2017 meeting, 66.3 (61/92) of posters presented at the 2018 meeting, 72.6% (69/95) of posters presented at the 2019 meeting, 70.2% (59/84) of posters presented at the 2020 meeting, and 88.8% (95/107) of posters presented at the 2021 meeting that received publication were published in an academic journal. At the time this study was conducted, the rates of posters that received publication up to five years post-presentation could not be assessed. However, it was discovered that 80 posters presented at the 2022 meeting and 49 posters presented at the 2023 meeting already received publication at the time this study was conducted.
Discussion
Both local and national annual meetings, regardless of medical specialty or subspecialty, serve to provide the opportunity to disseminate research. Within the field of orthopaedics, these meetings may also aid in screening research for relevance and quality as determined by publication rates. There are previous studies showing the rate of publication of research presented at educational meetings may in part dictate the quality of the meeting itself (Feschuk, Hathi, and Taylor 2023; Ramos, Matté Dagostini, Rabau, et al. 2020). In this study, we examined the publication rate of posters presented at the OTA Annual Meetings from 2017-2023.
Over the years, similar studies have been conducted on the publication rate of podium and/or poster presentations at meetings, providing a timeline of data to compare the results of this study to. Abstracts from the 2005-2010 OTA meetings had a publication rate of 66.3%, abstracts from the 2011-2016 OTA meetings had a publication rate of 54%, and abstracts from the 2017-2023 OTA meetings had a publication rate of 58% (Melvin and Cannada 2020; Lee et al. 2018). Additionally, the time to publication of abstracts presented at the OTA meetings was 28.3 months for the 2005-2010 meetings, 19.4 months for the 2011-2016 meetings, and 21.9 months for the 2017-2023 meetings (Melvin and Cannada 2020; Lee et al. 2018). The time to publication has dropped substantially since the 2005-2010 annual meetings, suggesting the quality of research presented at the OTA annual meetings has improved since.
In our study, the publication rate of abstracts presented at the OTA 2017-2023 Annual Meetings was 58%, which is higher than the abstract publication rate for the 2011-2016 annual meetings (54%) (Melvin and Cannada 2020). The publication rate of research displayed at orthopaedic surgery subspecialty annual meetings are as follows: 52% for the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine Annual Meeting (Klein, Giordano, Bartlett, et al. 2023); 58% for the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America Meeting (Rawicki, Fasani-Feldberg, Agarwalla, et al. 2022); 54% for the American Society for Surgery of the Hand Annual Meeting (Stepan, Chen, Prabhakar, et al. 2020); 44% for the Annual Meeting of the North American Spine Society (Narain et al. 2017); 24% for the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (Abicht et al. 2012); and 49% for the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Annual Meeting (Kay, Memon, de Sa, et al. 2016). While the publication rate of posters at the OTA is lower than some of these subspecialty meetings, this could be due to the size of the OTA annual meeting, which includes around 2,000 orthopaedic trauma surgeons annually. Table 4 provides a summary of publication rates for research presented at orthopaedic annual meetings and national conferences. It is of importance to note that not all research media presented that the conferences included in Table 4 are posters. The research media included in the table is largely comprised of podium presentations."
Our study is not without limitations. Although we used a systematic approach to search for which abstracts were ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals, there is still a possibility that a poster presentation that was published was not discovered during the search. Additionally, the OTA 2023 Annual Meeting occurred in October 2023. A similar study evaluating time to publication of research presented at the OTA 2011-2016 Annual Meetings found it takes over 19 months, on average, for research to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (Melvin and Cannada 2020). Therefore, publication rates of posters presented at the 2023 OTA Annual Meeting may not be accurate at the time this study was conducted (Lee et al. 2018). However, the study evaluating presentation-to-publication rates from 2011 to 2016 counted research published prior to presentation at the OTA meeting in their time-to-publication, which inflated the publication rate presented compared to the current study (Melvin and Cannada 2020).
Conclusion
Overall, this study demonstrated findings congruent with that of previous studies with a similar methodology. The presentation to publication rate of research presented at the OTA annual meeting remains higher than many other orthopaedic meetings and conferences, regardless of subspecialty. The publication rates of abstracts presented at the OTA annual meetings over time indicate that the research displayed is of high quality and is relevant to current orthopaedic clinical practice.
Acknowledgements
None
Funding statement
The authors attest no funding was received for this study and therefore no funding to disclose.