ASCO oral presenters five years later: Leaks in the pipeline?

11019 Background: There is growing awareness of the challenges of retaining oncologists engaged in research, and this leaky academic pipeline is most notable for women in medicine. Studying academic oncologists is challenging due to their many affiliations, but with an estimated attendance of over 30,000 oncologists, the ASCO annual meeting is a highly sought-after stage for presenting new research. To better understand the continued research engagement of oncologists active in research, we used public data from ASCO annual meetings to follow a cohort of oral abstract presenters over 5 years. Methods: To define our initial cohort of oncologists engaged in research, we used the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting Digital Program to identify first author oral abstract presenters. We tracked if each presenter was subsequently listed as an author of any research type (oral abstract session, poster session, education session, etc.) at the 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 ASCO conferences. We then filtered out researchers who were not listed as authors at ASCO in consecutive years to look at only those researchers who continued to have active ASCO involvement. To evaluate by gender, each presenter’s name was referenced with the publicly available Wiki-Gendersort tool for an unbiased assignment. Results: 209 first author oral abstract presenters were identified at the 2016 ASCO conference. We found that 67.9% of the initial 209 researchers were listed as authors at ASCO in 2017, 55.5% continued to be authors in 2018, 46.9% in 2019, 42.6% in 2020, and only 38.3% were still listed as authors 5 years later in 2021. When looking at sustained first authorship, 8.1% of the initial 209 research cohort continued to be listed as first authors for 5 consecutive years through 2021. We also looked at the breakdown of other types of ASCO presentations and found that 122 of the initial 209 research cohort presented posters in 2016. Of these 122 researchers, 60 (49.2%) remained authors of posters throughout the consecutive 5 years. This is significantly higher than the number of researchers who continued to author oral abstracts in 2021 49.2% vs. 3.8% (P < 0.0001). When evaluating the differences between gender, there were approximately twice as many men presenters as women (122 men vs 65 women; 22 names were unisex or unknown). The rate of retention was similar for men (47 of the initial 122 males, 38.5%) and women (25 of the initial 65 females, 38.5%) at 5 years (P = 1). Conclusions: We conducted a descriptive study evaluating the rate of sustained activity in academic oncology over 5 years. Our research suggests that about one-third of ASCO presenters will continue to have sustained yearly authorship at 5 years post-oral abstract presentation. Compared to men, the leaky academic pipeline is comparable for women in the 5 years following an oral abstract presentation at ASCO.