Summary
Conferences of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine, Part II: progress over 20 years of scientific activity
Affiliation of the authors
DOI
Quote
Casal Codesido JR, García-Castrillo Riesgo L, Miró O. Conferences of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine, Part II: progress over 20 years of scientific activity. Emergencias. 2008;20:428-34
Summary
Abstracts presented at national conferences of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES)
over the past 11 years (1998 through 2008) were quantified and analyzed. There was a mean of
726 abstracts per conference, with no significant changes in the numbers over these 11 years either
for the conference as a whole or between professional groups. The overall percentage of acceptance
was 85%, and this increased significantly over the study period. The quality of the communication
type was low: 65% just involved descriptive case series and only 3% were case-control studies.
Furthermore, 27% of the communications accepted were of low interest value, 46% showed little
novelty, 10% presented poor concordance between information given in the different sections of
the abstract, and 16% were poorly written. It would therefore be desirable to require higher quality
before accepting abstracts for future SEMES conferences and to develop a selection process that
focuses more on quality than on quantity.