Many shoulder and elbow abstracts presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meeting are cited in the orthopaedic literature or are used to guide orthopaedic practice, but not all of these abstracts are submitted, survive peer review, or eventually are published. Presuming unpublished works have not been scientifically confirmed, one could question whether it is academically responsible to cite abstracts presented at the AAOS before they are peer-reviewed and published. To partly address this issue we determined the peer-reviewed publication rate for 558 abstracts (233 papers and 325 posters) presented at the shoulder and elbow sessions of the AAOS from 1999 to 2004. In April 2007, we searched the computerized database MEDLINE and PubMed for published articles based on these abstracts. We examined the published articles to assess publication rate, time to publication, change in contents, change in authors, and change in conclusions of abstracts. The overall publication rate in peer-reviewed journals was 58% (321 of 558), similar to other orthopaedic meetings and medical disciplines. We believe it is unacceptable to cite shoulder and elbow abstracts submitted to the AAOS because only slightly more than (1/2) (58%) of them are authenticated scientifically.