Purpose The purpose of this study was to assess the publication rate of the abstracts presented at the 6th Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Congress, 2011 and the 7th European Congress on Emergency Medicine, 2012.

Materials and methods All abstracts, both posters and oral presentations, from the international emergency medicine congresses held by the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM) in 2011 and 2012 were identified. To establish whether these abstracts were subsequently published in peer-reviewed medical journals, the names of all the authors and the title of the abstracts were searched for in the databases of Clinical Key/Elsevier, EBSCO Discovery Service, MD Consult, Science Direct, Scopus, EMBASE, Medscape, Google Scholar and local ULAKBIM. The year of publication, consistency of author names and titles, the type of study, the journals in which papers were published and countries from which reports were submitted were all recorded.

Results A total of 1721 abstracts were examined; 626 from 2011 (307 oral presentations and 319 posters) and 1095 from 2012 (154 oral presentations and 941 posters). Of all abstracts in 2011, 172 (27.5%) and of all abstracts in 2012, 265 (24.2%) were subsequently published as full-text reports in peer-reviewed journals. Of the 172 papers published in 2011, 152 (88.4%) were accepted by Science Citation Index (SCI) and/or SCI Expanded (SCI-E) journals and 155 (58.5%) of 265 papers were accepted by SCI and/or SCI-E journals in 2012 (p=0.0001).

Conclusions The publication rate of abstracts submitted to international emergency medicine congresses held by EUSEM over those 2 years was low compared with that of abstracts presented in other emergency medicine congresses. Presenters should be encouraged to send their studies to peer-reviewed journals. During the selection process by the scientific panel, constructive critics should be notified to the presenters instead of simply accepting or rejecting the studies that submitted to the congress, which may increase the subsequent publication rate.