Our study found that few plastic surgery journals mention reporting guidelines or trial registration in their instructions for authors. Our study also found that journal policies regarding guideline adherence and trial registration seem to be effective mechanisms toward improvement, and plastic surgery journals should consider adopting such policies.

ObjectiveThis study aimed to determine the publication rate of oral and poster abstracts presented at the 2010 and 2011 Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) conferences as well as the journals that most commonly published these studies, their 5-year impact factor, the time to publication, and the reasons for nonpublication.MethodsAbstracts presented at the 2010–2011 SGO conferences were included in this study. We searched Google, Google Scholar, and PubMed to locate published reports of these abstracts. If an abstract's full-text manuscript could not be located, an author of the conference abstract was contacted via email to inquire whether the research was published. If the research was unpublished, the authors were asked to provide the reason for nonpublication. The time to publication, journal, and journal impact factor were noted for abstracts that reached full-text publication.ResultsA total of 725 abstracts were identified, of which 386 (53%) reached publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Oral presentations were published at a higher rate than poster presentations. Most (70%) reached publication within 2 years of abstract presentation. Abstracts were published in 89 journals, but most (39%) were published in Gynecologic Oncology. The mean time to publication was 15.7 months, with a mean 5-year impact factor of 4.956.ConclusionsA 53% publication rate indicates that the SGO conference selection process favors research likely to be published and, thus, presumably of high quality. The overall publication rate is higher than that reported for many other biomedical conferences.