Advantages and Potential Dangers of Presentation Before Publication

n all fields of medicine, many investigators choose to present their research at scientific meetings before publication.In ophthalmology, a variety of organizations provide venues for such presentations, for example, at the annual meetings of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology or the American Academy of Ophthalmology.Presentations at scientific meetings provide an important venue for researchers to share their methods, results, and conclusions with some of their peers.Valuable feedback may result in the adoption of different methods, analysis of additional results, or restructuring of conclusions.The end result may be that the scientific community benefits as the work is refined and improved before publication. POTENTIAL DANGERS OF SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATIONSScientific writers for the public (eg, newspaper reporters) or for eye care professionals (eg, writers for commercial publications, sometimes termed "tabloids" or "throwaway" journals, usually with little or no peer-review process) may publish information from scientific presentations.Information published in tabloids from scientific presentations often includes "topline" results or brief summaries that may appeal to busy physician readers, 1 but it usually does not include detailed methods or discussion of potential limitations of the research methods.Routine publication of research results from scientific presentations in non-peer-reviewed formats before publication in peer-reviewed journals could potentially endanger the viability of peer-reviewed journals.