Reading a meeting you do not attend
Programmes identify a meeting’s planned subjects and participants, while published summaries, reports and presentation materials provide ways to learn about its content without attending.
Programmes and panels
A planned panel can identify both a question for discussion and the professional perspectives invited to address it. A panel announced for the International Publication Planning Association’s February 2010 Midwest meeting asked whether confidence in the industry could be re-established, under the subtitle “The Case for Self-Advocacy”. Its planned participants were:
- A regulatory consulting, medical writing and quality-assurance specialist as moderator.
- A deputy editor of the BMJ.
- An immediate past president of AMWA.
- The president of the Drug Information Association.
- A division lead from UBC-Envision Group.
- The chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Reports and presentation materials
Meeting content has been made available as downloadable summaries, presentation slide sets and journal reports. An in-depth summary of the International Publication Planning Association’s seventh annual meeting in June 2009 was offered as a PDF download.
EQUATOR listed materials from the September 2009 sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, including the following.
- A workshop on key guidelines for reporting health research studies.
- The second EQUATOR annual lecture, “Redescribing Medicine”, on reporting or reclaiming research for health.
- A presentation on spin in reports of randomised controlled trials with non-statistically significant primary outcomes.
- A systematic review of reporting guidelines for clinical research.
A report of the joint ICR–EMWA symposium, “Writing Protocols: Collaboration and Compromise or Conflict and Confusion?”, appeared in The Write Stuff in 2009, volume 18, issue 2, pages 127–129, and was offered through EMWA’s website.