The unforeseen impact of meeting abstracts on cancer research

ABSTRACT: The dissemination of scientific information usually occurs through peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, scientific conferences have shown to be an instance for researchers to communicate their results, obtaining immediate feedback on their findings. Yet, some researchers disregard the information presented at these conferences simply because it has not gone through a peer review process [1]. Therefore, I decided to assess the impact of meeting abstracts indexed by the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2010 that were grouped by their topic ‘cancer’.