Publication rates and quality assessment of abstracts presented at National Education Congresses and Symposia between 2010 and 2014

The conversion of a study to publishing in international peer-reviewed journals demonstrates both the study's quality and the congress's scientific level. The paper quality scales have been shown to be effective in converting a work presented as a paper into a publication. Abstracts presented at national medical education congresses and symposiums between 2010 and 2014, when the 5-year period required for publication had expired, were reviewed. The papers were assessed using the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI) scale. In international and national peer-reviewed journals, 11.3% (n=51) of all articles were published. The publication rate was 26.6% for oral presentations and 8.1% for poster presentations. Oral presentations had a statistically higher publication rate than poster presentations (p=.000). Of the reports, 85.9% included single-group cross-sectional studies, 7.5% included pre-post-test design studies, and 5.7% included a comparison group. 0.6% were randomized trials. 84.1% of the studies were conducted in a single institution and 15.8% of them included objective data. In 93.9 % of the studies, satisfaction, perception, or opinion outcomes were provided, while knowledge-skill results were examined in 5.7%. For all reports, the lowest MERSQI score was 5 and the highest was 15.5. The mean MERSQI score for poster presentations was 7.61±2.6, for oral presentations it was 8.28±2.46, and for all articles, it was 7.73±2.59.The oral presentations had higher MERSQI mean ratings (p=.032) than poster presentations. The MERSQI mean score of the published papers was 10.07±2.74, and the MERSQI mean score of the unpublished papers was 7.43±2.41 (p=.000).