Background: Conference abstracts, often the first public record of a study, serve as a catalyst to initiate clinical and policy change. On average, 45% of all conference abstracts subsequently appear in the peer-review literature, however the generalizability of this finding to studies of one intervention, in one population, is unknown. Objectives: To determine the full publication rate of a cohort of abstracts, median time to publication and predictors of these relationships. Methods: We included the first five years of clinical abstract reports of rituximab for non-Hodgkin lymphoma from American Society of Hematology meetings (1997-2001), identified all unique studies, and used electronic databases to identify full publications. We determined the full publication rate, median time to publication and predictors of these outcomes. Results: Of 109 abstracts representing 86 unique studies, the publication rate was 52.3% (45, 95% CI [41.3, 63.2]), and the median time to publication was 1.4 years with 6.8 years median follow-up. Author affiliation with industry (odds ratio, OR, 95% CI = 4.60 [1.32,16.08] and presentation type (oral OR = 5.94 [1.31, 26.88], poster OR = 3.39 [1.24, 9.25]) independently predicted subsequent full publication in the adjusted analysis. We identified no predictors of time to publication. Conclusions: We suggest cautious consideration of data from conference proceedings to inform new technology clinical or policy decisions. Future work needs to examine the generalizability of our results to other diseases and technologies. Acknowledgements: M. Kho is funded by a Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research through the Clinical Research Initiative.