OBJECTIVES: Although full-text articles are a primary source of evidence, abstracts and posters presented at annual scientific meetings or congresses are an important route for disseminating current datasets, presenting a range of updated ongoing trial results to and small-scale real-world findings. This study aimed to characterize the patterns of congress abstract publications in multiple myeloma (MM).

METHODS: An SLR was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Item for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to identify congress abstracts of interventional and real-world studies describing efficacy, safety, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) or economic outcomes. As such, EMBASE, MEDLINE, and Cochrane databases were searched between January 2019 and search date (31/12/2020) to identify all congress abstracts published in the past two years, and were extracted and categorized using the PubTracker™ platform.

RESULTS: Of 3964 total citations within MM in the past two years, 618 (15.6%) were congress abstracts, most frequently from ASH (24.9%), EHA (22%), IMW (19.6%), ISPOR (9.1%), ASCO (4.9%), BSH (3.7%), SIE (3.4%), EBMT (3.2%), TCT (2.4%), and other congresses (6.8%). Almost three times as many congress abstracts identified were published in 2019 (71.7%) versus 2020 (28.3%), likely due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic producing either cancellations or “virtual meetings”. Within congress abstracts identified, the majority (52.43%) were real-world studies, followed by interventional studies (32.04%), both reporting efficacy and safety outcomes. Congress abstracts reporting economic and HRQoL outcomes were less frequent (10.35% and 5.18%, respectively). Studies were mainly conducted in the USA (29.10%), and 5.66% were multi-national.

CONCLUSIONS: Congress abstracts are an important source of evidence within the ever-changing therapeutic landscape of MM and are increasingly utilized to disseminate data obtained in the real-world setting. Almost half of all identified congress abstracts were presented at ASH, EHA, and IMW, demonstrating the need for these congresses to be closely tracked.