Editor, Proceedings of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California

The importance of publishing in the Proceedings of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California

William K. Reisen

Editor, Proceedings of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California

Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology

School of Veterinary Medicine

University of California

Davis, CA 95616

The Proceedings content from the 2017 Annual Meeting has now been received and edited. This year there were 33 manuscript submissions from speakers, of which 16 were considered to be Papers of several pages length and 17 were Abstracts. In addition, there were two Reeves’ award submissions and one submitted manuscript covering material not presented at the Annual Meeting. This left an additional 32 talks for which we have no record, other than the Abstract submitted as part of the Request to Present a Paper. These 32 Abstracts frequently did not summarize results, but rather indicated what the speaker planned to present at the Annual Meeting. All 68 manuscripts will be published in the 2017 Proceedings, regardless of the extent of content, so at least we will have a record of what occurred at the Annual Meeting beyond the Program.

I have been attending the MVCAC Annual Meetings since first joining the University of California (UC) at Berkeley in 1980. At this time there was considerable participation from researchers at the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, UCLA and Riverside, and an informative series of papers published each year in the Proceedings. The former UC Mosquito Research Program grants provided the impetus for this attendance, because a lack of participation in the Annual MVCAC meeting would often be followed by a lack of funding for the next grant application! However, with the demise of this program and the redirection of most faculty positions from California mosquito problems, UC participation at the Annual Conference has diminished, and this year there was not a single paper submitted to the Proceedings by a UC faculty as first author.

The technical void vacated by UC facility participation has been largely filled by many Districts hiring PhD level managerial or technical staff. These individuals have bolstered surveillance, built and staffed diagnostic laboratories, and have conductedresearch, including field trials of new products. Unfortunately, these individual’s careers are not tied to a ‘publish or perish’ paradigm and few have seen fit to submit papers describing their work to the Proceedings.

Technical writing is work, but forces you to support your claims/statements with data/observations, and if analyzed properly, limits your claims to within levels of statistical probability. So why then is writing results for publication in the Proceedings important:

1. Record of accomplishment. Although presentations at the Annual Meeting are a useful and rapid way to exchange ideas, there are no permanent records of these talks and the material presented is often soon forgotten. Writing up your methods and results supported by a summary table or figure provides a permanent record of what you did and what you found.
2. Prevention of duplication. As the Proceedings are now on line and indexed, it is easy to search previous years for topics/authors. This allows those planning research to examine the Proceedings to see what has been tried or accomplished within California. Unless the data also are published in the open literature, these findings are not indexed elsewhere and cannot be found by searching PubMed or other data bases. In addition, the Proceedings provides an outlet for preliminary or in-progress results of multi-year studies that may not be accepted for publication in other venues.
3. Analysis. Statistically analyzing results to summarize data in tables and graphs forces the researcher to closelyscrutinize their data and support their statements with statistical probabilities. Often seemingly obvious differences do not extend beyond normal variation and are not truly different, until repeated with sufficient replication. This provides justification for additional studies to prove what think happened is actually true.

In summary, I would like to see greater interest in publishing adequate descriptions of the conference talks within the Proceedings by members of the MVCAC. Kate Hicks and I are here to help and facilitate this publication process.