Abstract
Scientific medical conferences have proliferated in recent years but little data are available to assess their effectiveness in achieving their commonly stated aims “to educate, advance science, and establish evidence-based policy”. The recent expansion of what has been labeled ‘predatory academia’ has heightened concerns about the quality of both published and conference “science”. A journal’s impact factor (JIF) became one accepted metric for the quality of publication science, but no such indicator exists for medical scientific conferences, such as a conference impact factor (CIF). To explore the feasibility of implementing a CIF metric for such conferences, we tested a tool that establishes a ranking system to help both attendees and funders identify quality. Using abstracts presented from 2013 to 2016 at an annual meeting (International Workshop on HIV/Hepatitis Observational Databases), we determined how many were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. We then calculated a CIF by dividing the number of peer reviewed published papers by the number of abstracts presented at each conference, then multiplied it by the median value of JIF of the publishing journals. For evaluating the quality of a scientific conference, the use of a CIF which, although limited in scope, can act as a tool for attendees and funders to prioritize their time and resources.
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Abbreviations
- JIF:
-
Journal impact factor
- CIF:
-
Conference impact factor
- IWHOD:
-
International Workshop on HIV/Hepatitis Observational Databases
- CPD/CME:
-
Continuing professional or medical development credits
- RCR:
-
Relative citation ratio
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge and thank Andrea Cartier, the IWHOD secretariat for her critical contributions to this work. We would like to acknowledge all the authors of the abstracts presented at IWHOD for their responses to our requests as their contribution made this work possible.
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No funding was received for this work.
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All authors contributed equally to the development and construction of the study and the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The authors declare that they no competing interests.
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Datasets generated during this study are not publicly available due to confidentiality requirements and the nature of the data being identifying.
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Disclaimer The use of IWHOD as a candidate for implementation of this metric was not meant to promote IWHOD specifically and was intended only as an example.
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Lang, R., Porter, K., Krentz, H.B. et al. Evaluating medical conferences: the emerging need for a quality metric. Scientometrics 122, 759–764 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03291-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03291-w