Silverthorne, Colorado

The time and money spent attending small scientific meetings is more than paid back through accelerated research, suggests a survey by a conference organizer.

“The presumption is that meetings are beneficial, but the actual data to say that something positive happens are pretty scarce,” says James Aiken, president of Keystone Symposia, the non-profit meetings organization in Silverthorne, Colorado, that carried out the survey.

Researchers who attended Keystone symposia on molecular and cell biology held during 2004 and 2005 later saved six weeks of research time and US$6,000 in funding, according to median figures from the survey. The data represent a rare attempt to quantify just how effectively small meetings spur research.

The survey included only Keystone's own meetings, an admittedly transparent attempt to justify their worth. But independent scientists and organizations say that the findings could apply to other conferences as well.

“It quantifies something that we've always believed,” says Howard Garrison, director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. The federation puts on six large conferences each year that attract a total of around 35,000 participants.

The presumption is that meetings are beneficial, but actual data are scarce.

The Keystone study surveyed 1,013 participants from ten conferences, ranging from obesity to the biology of hypoxia. Participants were asked how strongly they agreed with certain statements, such as: “I will leave this conference planning to accelerate publication of some of my data.” Nine months later, an e-mail follow-up confirmed whether they had acted as planned.

At the nine-month mark, 90% of scientists said they had shared information with colleagues at their home institutions who had not attended the conference; 60% had established collaborations or shared information with fellow participants; and almost half had accelerated data publication. Roughly two-thirds of attendees said they had altered the direction of their research based on what they learned at the conference.

At the meetings, 85% of scientists anticipated that information they gathered would save them time and money in the lab, but only 42% later reported experiencing such savings. And the savings estimates ranged widely — from 1 week to 2 years and from $50 to $2.5 million.

Meeting attendees said that conferences that are small and highly interactive, such as the Keystone symposia, have particularly high pay-offs compared with larger, more impersonal meetings.

“The lab can jump ahead by being made aware of new technologies and databases,” says Charles Shoemaker, a parasite researcher at Tufts University in North Grafton, Massachusetts.

Take a view: are small conferences worth going to? One organizer says attendees save weeks in the lab. Credit: H. KING/CORBIS

Pathologist Anjana Rao, at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, organized a 2004 Keystone symposium on cell signalling. She notes that a team of researchers might save up to $20,000 by learning that a group at another laboratory had already developed a mouse model that could be useful in their research.

Researchers say it is difficult to quantify the exact benefits accrued by conferences. “How do you add all of it up to a precise number?” asks Shoemaker. “You can't. But it's big, and it's real.”