National Databank for Rheumatic Diseases
Research Notes From the Director
Happy New Year 2004! And as always, thanks to all of you who by participating in NDB research advance knowledge of arthritis and arthritis treatment.
2003 was a very busy and very rewarding year for NDB research. Your data contributed to 21 research presentations for the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Annual Scientific Meeting, and to 17 manuscripts that were published in scientific medical journals throughout the world.
To help you understand what all this means let's take an inside look at the ACR meeting.
Each fall rheumatologists from all over the world come to the United States for the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Research meeting. European and Asian rheumatologists also have research meetings, but the ACR meeting is so big and so important that all serious international researchers make it their business to come to this meeting.
Research that is accepted for presentation at the meeting goes through rigorous evaluation before it is accepted. Researchers who want to present their research at the meeting prepare 'abstracts,' or short summaries, of their work and submit them for review before the end of June. Each abstract is judged by approximately 5 experts who give it a rating based on their estimates of its quality and research importance. Perhaps 50 experts in all participate in the evaluations.
After that, a committee meets and ranks all of the abstracts. The best are selected to be podium presentations; the rest are chosen to be poster presentations. About 50 percent of the approximately 5,000 abstracts submitted are rejected and are not presented at the meeting. Only about 10 percent of accepted abstracts become podium presentations. A podium presentation is an oral presentation before a large audience in which the research results are displayed as slides on a large screen.
Perhaps 20 of the very best podium abstracts are presented at 'plenary sessions' - times at the ACR meeting when all other activities are closed down and physicians are asked to come and hear the best abstracts. This year the NDB had 85 percent of all abstracts accepted, and had 5 podium presentations, 1 of which was a plenary presentation. Dr. Victoria Cartwright, a CHORD fellow, presented two (2) podium presentations for the NDB, Kaleb Michaud gave one (1) podium presentation and Dr. Wolfe presented two (2).
Some people think that poster presentations are a better way to present research. The rheumatologist presenting at a poster session prepares the a 3 foot by 5 foot poster which is then mounted to a board. The researcher stands in front of the board for several hours and discusses the study results and answers questions from all of the meeting attendees who comes to see the presentation.
After the meeting is complete the next step is to write up our research findings for publications. This is the most difficult part, for the manuscripts we write are rigorously reviewed by highly trained experts, and much care is taken to ensure our results are accurate. All manuscripts pass through this review process, which sometimes can take over a year, before they can be published in scientific and medical journals.
Included in this newsletter is a list of the names of all NDB manuscripts written and published during 2003.