Quality Assessment of Abstracts of the International Congress of Nephrology and Urology (ICNU 2015)

Abstract

Background: There are some legislated criteria for improving the quality of articles’ abstract presentation. Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate oral and poster abstracts submitted at the first International Congress of Nephrology and Urology, held in Tehran during June, 2015. Methods: One hundred and forty-eight abstracts were assessed by 2 reviewers. Using the 19-item Timer checklist, the researchers examined the study design, number of au-thors, field of study, and language and quality score for each abstract. The comparisons between groups were done using the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests by SPSS software with P values of less than 0.05 considered as significant. Results: The quality score mean of all articles of congress was 0.65±0.14. Structured abstracts (P = 0.026), articles of student field (P value = 0.032), and of human observational design (P value = 0.007) had a significantly better quality score. The best average score of the Timer checklist was related to subjects' appropriateness for the study question (1.89 ± 0.35) and the worst was related to method and appropriateness of subjective selection (0.89 ± 0.84). Discussion: Developing a specific quality scale for basic studies, assessing articles stricter before acceptance and necessitating authors to write their abstracts in structured form are required.