quality assessment of abstracts of the international congress of nephrology and urology (icnu 2015)

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 nephrol- ogy 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 authors, 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.