Through the looking glass: evaluating the dissemination of research in cardiology

This editorial refers to ‘From abstract to impact in cardiovascular research: factors predicting publication and citation’, by S. Winnik et al. , doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehs113 In many ways, organizing any scientific conference in medicine is the same. Dates are announced, location chosen, and a call for research abstracts is made. Often, large numbers are submitted for consideration, each structured similarly—Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusions—limited to 400 or 500 words. And for every meeting, the goal is to choose the very highest quality, most promising research for presentation to conference attendees. For the best research, an oral plenary presentation may be invited; for high quality work deemed to be slightly less innovative or important, oral presentations in smaller venues or even posters within an exhibit hall may instead be offered. Others are simply rejected. Seemingly, this approach has served the scientific community well for years as a means to identify and communicate new and impactful research to clinicians and scientists.However, scientifically evaluating these abstracts poses several challenges. First, abstract reviewers are given limited instructions and simply asked to score submissions on a scale from 1 to 10, potentially making assessments more variable. Secondly, reviewers are asked to evaluate many submissions over a short period of time. With such time constraints, reviewers may rush evaluations and use criteria other than scientific merit and quality, such as investigators' reputations or affiliated institutions when this information is available.1 Thirdly, reviewers are responsible for broad categories of submissions, rather than specific topics, in which they have less subject expertise. Finally, and most importantly, abstracts—brief summaries of the full research project—contain a limited amount of information. Few methodological details are available, the rigour of the scientific approach and study limitations are less obvious, and detailed results are unavailable.How can the medical community be certain that high quality …