Quality Assessment of Abstracts of the Xth Congress of the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation: Does It Need Improvement?

Background and Aims: As all submitted abstracts, are not published as full articles in every meeting, therefore a published abstract is often the only source to earn the methodology and results of a study. The current study was designed to evaluate the abstracts quality of Xth  congress of the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation (MESOT) held November 2006.

Methods: Quality assessment checklist, which was developed by Timmer et al, was used to evaluate abstract quality. One hundred and fifteen abstracts of total 449 abstracts were selected by cluster random sampling. From oral and poster presentations we examined study type, study design, country of study, number of au- thors, organ type and quality score for each study. Evaluation was done by a reviewer.

Results: The human observational study was the most common type of study (72%). 59.1% of all abstracts had been submitted by Iran. The majority of abstracts had 5-10 authors (61%) and the most common transplanted organ was kidney (77%). The mean ± SD of all abstracts was 0.67±0.12 and 89.6% had quality score >0.5. Human observational studies with 0.69±0.11 quality score had highest score. The highest quality was related to object description and design evident had the lowest quality.

Conclusion: published abstract at Xth   MESOT congress had good quality score and design evident of researches must be improved in the future.