Publication Rates for Oral Manuscript and Poster Presentations From the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons: 2010 to 2014.

The American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (ACFAS) annual conference has served as a premiere platform to disseminate the latest innovations and research in the field of foot and ankle surgery. The quality of national society conferences is often assessed indirectly by analyzing the the journal publication rate of the abstracts presented. The purpose of this retrospective study was to assess the journal publication rate for abstracts (oral manuscripts and posters) accepted for presentation at the ACFAS conference from 2010 to 2014. All accepted abstracts from this period were compiled by the ACFAS office. PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus searches were performed using abstract titles and author names. Overall, the journal publication rate was 76.9% (83 of 108) for oral manuscripts and 23.2% (258 of 1113) for poster abstracts. The mean time to publication was 9.6 (range 0 to 44) months and 19.8 (range 0 to 66) months for oral and poster abstracts, respectively. The most common journal for abstract publication was The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery. Notably, the ACFAS oral manuscript publication rate from 2010 to 2014 (76.9%) exceeded its previously reported rate from 1999 to 2008 (67.5%) and the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society podium publication rate from 2008 to 2012 (73.7%). To the best of our knowledge, the publication incidence for oral abstracts presented at the ACFAS conference is now the highest reported of any national foot and ankle society conference to date.