Research

Research in Action

By Nathalia Jimenez MD, MPH
SPA Research Committee
Seattle Children’s Hospital

The SPA Research Committee is very excited to announce the beginning of a regular section on the newsletter dedicated to research communications and news. We have three main objectives: to make ourselves available to the broader community of academic anesthesiologists; to share with you some of the work the committee is doing; and to provide practical guidance and support meeting attendees who present their academic work.  We hope that this new communication channel will help provide some mentorship and ultimately promote research and other academic endeavors within our subspecialty.

We have a list of topics that we plan to cover, from how to write an abstract to how to get the best from your mentor; however, we are also open to suggestions from the membership at large. To start this section off, we would like to briefly talk about abstract writing and submission.

We received a record number of abstracts for the 2017 SPA spring meeting.  There were 527 abstract submissions, from which 342 abstracts were accepted. Abstracts were reviewed by 10 separate review teams, each composed of three members of the research committee. This review process is blinded to academic affiliations and authors.

Due to the large number of submissions, acceptance is competitive. To understand some of the most common reasons why abstracts don’t get accepted, we should consider case reports separately from research and educational and Quality Improvement abstracts. For case reports, it is important to describe the full case and explicitly describe the learning points, or the specific contribution the case report adds to existing knowledge. Very often, we receive case reports consisting of short descriptions of the pathology without further discussion. While rare diseases and anesthetic events are interesting, it is hard for the reviewers to really understand what this abstract will add to the field unless it is explicitly described.

For research abstracts, a mere description of the planned study without discussion of the results is not sufficient, and these types of submissions are not encouraged. Another common issue is lack of detail in the description of research methods for research abstracts or procedures for quality improvement and education abstracts. It is always a good idea to remember that what seems obvious to you is not necessary obvious to the reader.

Dr. David Polaner has written an excellent piece on how to write an abstract. If you are planning in submitting an abstract, consider reading it to guide your submission.

We would like to hear from you, so if you have questions, or suggestions for possible topics for this section, please e-mail us at (bob@societyhq.com).