Study characteristics of abstracts presented at the annual meetings of the southeastern section of the American Urological Association (1996-2005).

Purpose: We determined study characteristics, authorship and institutional origin of studies presented in abstract form at the Southeastern Section of the American Urological Association annual meetings and identified predictors of full text publication.Materials and Methods: All abstracts of poster and podium presentations from the Southeastern Section of the American Urological Association annual meetings from 1996 to 2005 were reviewed. A standardized evaluation form was developed and tested in 2 subsets of 50 abstracts, and then applied by 2 individual reviewers with specific coding instructions. Predictor variables analyzed included study origin, design, topic, domain, presentation form, number of patients, reporting of statistical analysis and gender. Univariate and multivariate analysis was applied using SPSS® version 14.0.Results: A total of 1,195 abstracts were found eligible for review. The mean number of abstracts presented per year was 120 ± 16 (range 107 to 146). In clinical studies (1,068) a...