How far do oral lectures at European Orthodontic Society congresses reach? A comparison of abstract publication rates, article citations, and social media mentions.

Objectives This study investigated the scientific impact of oral abstracts presented in five consecutive European Orthodontic Society (EOS) congresses in terms of full-text publication rates as well as citations and social media metrics (altmetrics) of the resulting articles.Methods PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.nl/) were screened to identify published articles originally presented as lectures at EOS 2015-2019. EOS date, abstract title, subject, number of authors, authors' names, first author's country of origin, and type of affiliation were extracted from congress abstract books. Altmetric Attention Scores (AASs), number of X (formerly Twitter) posts, Mendeley reads, and citations of the articles were retrieved from Altmetric Explorer and Web of Science (WoS) databases, respectively. Abstract details, full publication rates and Altmetric mentions and WoS citations of the related articles were analysed using univariable and multivariable logistic regression.Results In total, 51.79 to 73.91% of the lectures presented at EOS 2015-2019 were converted into peer-reviewed articles. There was a median interval of 10.95 months (interquartile range 20.5 months) between conference and publication dates. EOS congress year (overall Wald test P-value = .04) and number of authors (overall Wald test P-value < .01) were significant predictors for full-text publication of oral lectures. There was no significant effect of EOS presentation on AASs, citations, X posts, and Mendeley readers (P > .05).Limitations Journal impact factors and quartile rankings were not considered to determine the impact of the journals that published articles originally presented as EOS oral abstracts.Conclusions Overall, 61.30% of EOS 2015-2019 lectures were published as full-length articles. Multi-authored abstracts presented higher odds of publication, whereas oral abstracts presented at EOS 2015 and 2018 had the lowest probabilities to reach full publication. EOS abstract-based articles were assigned similar numbers of citations and AASs to articles not presented at EOS congresses.