BACKGROUND: Great part of the scientific production presented in congresses is not published. Even in developed countries, figures show an expressive difference between presentations and publications. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the number of published and indexed articles, based on available national and international databases, searching for titles and authors of papers and panels from Brazilian vascular surgery congresses held in 2001 and 2003. METHODS: Searches were performed on the abstracts presented on the XXXIV Brazilian Congress of Angiology and Vascular Surgery, in 2001, and XXXV Congress of Angiology and Vascular Surgery in 2003, respectively 541 and 567 presentations. A computerized search was performed using the following databases: Scirus, Bireme, LILACS, SciELO, MEDLINE-PubMed, Cochrane, Google Scholar and Jornal Vascular Brasileiro indexes. The articles were classified as national or international and as original or modified. RESULTS: Twenty-one (3.89%) and 49 (8.64%) articles from the Brazilian Congresses of Vascular Surgery of 2001 and 2003 were found, respectively. The average publication rate of papers presented in both congresses was 6.32%. CONCLUSIONs: The number of publications in this sample show how much research in Brazil is put aside. Many papers are not published because of lack of priority and tradition in writing, lack of time, effort and encouragement.
Research; meeting abstracts; authorship and co-authorship in scientific publications