To assess the rate of neurology education related abstracts presented during the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meetings from 2020-2024 that are then published as manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.

Each year, numerous abstracts are presented at the AAN Annual Meeting, with a portion of those being related to neurology education. Some abstracts are published as journal articles to be shared with a wider audience; however, little evidence exists looking at the rate of neurology education abstracts submitted to conferences versus those that are ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals.

A manual search of abstracts presented at the AAN Annual Meetings 2020-2024 was conducted by the authors. The abstracts identified were then searched in multiple engines including PubMed, the Neurology: Education website, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and the author’s institution medical library (UOttawa OMNI) and at four different time points – January 2024, August 2024, January 2025, and September 2025 – to determine if they had been published in peer-reviewed journals. Data was organized by year of the Annual Meeting and year of publication.

Of the 295 identified abstracts, a total of 73 (25%) had been published in peer-reviewed journals. When looking at each AAN Annual Meeting from 2020-2024, publication rates were 22%, 29%, 34%, 23%, and 18% respectively. Of the abstracts published, most were published in the same year as or the year following the Annual Meeting they were submitted to. 47% of the abstracts were published in Neurology and Neurology: Education, and 53% in various subspecialty journals.

On average, a quarter of neurology education abstracts presented at the Annual Meeting are subsequently published. In contrast, data from other medical fields demonstrates a publication rate between 30-60%. Further research is required to determine why abstracts focusing on medical education represent the lower end of the publication spectrum.