The impact of European Neuromuscular Centre (ENMC) workshops on the neuromuscular field; 25 years on ...

Since 1992, the European Neuromuscular Centre facilitated workshops to bring experts in the field of neuromuscular disorders together. After organising more than 235 workshops, it is time to evaluate what impact these 25 years of ENMC workshops have had on the neuromuscular research field and on people affected by a neuromuscular condition. To measure this, workshop topics were retrospectively evaluated and bibliometric analyses on the citation scores of ENMC-derived publications were performed. In addition, a personalized survey was used to investigate the actual achievement and implementation of workshop deliverables. The evaluation of 25 years' workshop topics revealed a strong representation of muscular dystrophies, congenital and mitochondrial myopathies. The publications derived from ENMC workshops scored "high impact" as illustrated by the Mean Normalized Citation Score of 1.24. Also 16% of the ENMC papers belong to the top 10% best cited articles in the neuromuscular field. The main outcome of the personalised survey was that 90% of all workshop deliverables were started and either ongoing or completed. Of these deliverables, 78% were implemented in the field; bringing state-of-the-art knowledge and new collaborations to researchers and clinicians, improving designs of clinical trials and innovating tools to make accurate diagnoses.