UroToday.com In the June issue of the Journal of Urology, Dr. Philipp Dahm and colleagues report that duplicate presentations commonly occur at the American Urological Association (AUA) and European Association of Urology (EAU) annual meetings.

The authors state that duplicate presentations of the same data at multiple meetings has disadvantages to include decreasing the opportunity for other presentations and decreasing the newsworthiness of the duplicate data. In this report, duplicate presentations at the AUA and EAU annual meetings in 2005, 2006, and 2007 were identified. The 2006 annual association meetings served as the reference meeting. The annual meeting online abstract databases were used to identify clinical research studies, and basic science was excluded. Only studies of identical design and objective were considered duplicates. The authors also determined the publication rate of duplicate abstracts using the science citation index.

At the 2006 EAU and AUA annual meetings, 282 and 312 prostate cancer related abstracts were identified, respectively. Similar characteristics were identified with regard to the number of authors, the country of authorship, and the study design. The median number of contributing authors was 6, and 81% of duplicate abstracts originated in a single country. Among the identified prostate cancer abstracts, 92.4% were observational studies and most commonly uncontrolled case series in 45.4%. At the AUA, abstracts originated from North America in 69.2%, Europe in 25.6% and other parts of the world in 5.1%. At the EAU, abstracts originated from North America in 12.1%, Europe in 79.1% and other parts of the world in 8.9%. In the AUA abstracts, study sample size was significantly higher with 50% including over 500 subjects compared with 29.4% at the EAU meeting. Overall duplicate rate of AUA abstracts at the 2006 annual meeting was 19.2% (60 of 312) and 48 of these 60 were presented at the EAU meeting the same year. Eight were presented at the EAU meeting the previous year (2005) and 4 presented the following year (2007). At the 2006 EAU meeting, the duplication rate of prostate cancer abstracts was 20.9% (59 of 282) with 48 of 59 presented at the 2006 AUA meeting, 3 the year before and 8 the year after.

Among the duplicated abstracts, 40.8% had a modified title and in 43.6% of studies the number of authors changed. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that an outcome study design type and European abstract origin were the strongest predictors of duplicate presentation. With a followup of 30 months, 25 of 71 studies (35.1%) were published in journals indexed by the PubMed. Most commonly the journal was European Urology (32%). In summary one fifth of prostate cancer clinical research abstracts were presented at the AUA and EAU annual meetings in duplicate.

Pop GH, Fesperman SF, Ball DA, Yeung LL, Vieweg J, Dahm P
J Urol. 2009 Aug;182(2)6748
doi10.1016/j.juro.2009.04.024

Written by UroToday.com Contributing Editor Christopher P. Evans, MD, FACS

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