Predictors of publication rate from 2018 and 2019 IMPRS abstracts: an exploratory analysis

Abstract

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND: Since 2017 the IU School of Medicine has offered the opportunity to medical students to participate in the Indiana University Medical Student Program for Research and Scholarship (IMPRS). For many students, this is the first opportunity to conduct research in clinical medicine and have their research abstract available in the Proceedings of IMPRS journal, enhancing the visibility of their research and later publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. We determined and analyzed which abstracts from the IMPRS 2018 and 2019 program were then published as peer-reviewed articles. STUDY OBJECTIVE: Our purpose was to determine the proportion of abstracts presented at the IMPRS Summer Program Oral Presentation Symposium during 2018 and 2019 that were further published as full articles in peer-reviewed publications, the time lag to publication, and the factors associated with successful publication. We will identify potential trends or predictors of publication by comparing the years of presentation and publication, the journals where the abstract was published, the IMPRS research track, financial support received, IMPRS program award winning status, and research topics of the published abstracts. METHODS: A total of 241 abstracts were presented at the IMPRS oral Presentation Symposium during 2018 and 2019 (abstracts were identified from the records uploaded in the Proceedings of IMPRS website http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/IMPRS). We used Pubmed, Google Scholar, Dimensions database, and Citation Finder app to search and find accurate citations of the final version of the published abstract. We combined the author names of the students and mentors with keywords from the abstracts. We used PubMed to gather the articles' medical subject heading (MeSH) terms to perform a co-occurrence analysis. We used Excel to aggregate, clean up and analyze the data and VOSviewer software to generate the topic analysis and visualization map. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Overall, 52 of the abstracts (publication rate of 21.6%) have been published in 49 peer-reviewed scholarly publications, by January 2022, with an average and median time between the oral presentation and the official date of publication of 21 months (IQR=9, 26-17). The articles identified were published in 44 journals and one book series; the journal Journal Impact Factor (JIF) ranged from 1.276 to 21.198 (mean 5.62). The journal with the most published articles (≥ 4) was the Journal of Surgical Research. The majority of papers presented at IMPRS 2018 and 2019 that end up with a publication belong to the “Laboratory and translational research” IMPRS research track (66.7%). This approach aims to contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of the abstracts presented in the context of the IMPRS program that continues the process of publishing manuscripts in peer-reviewed scholarly publications. The findings provide relevant insight to the librarians concerning their involvement and support with the IMPRS program in advising students about initial steps toward scholarly publishing.