Objective:

to describe the characteristics of the participation in scientific events of spanish nurses and scientific production associated with them.

Method:

cross-sectional descriptive study with Ad-Hoc online survey distributed; with snowball sampling.

Results:

1033 valid answers. The profiles that participate more in congresses are men (30,3 % p <0.01) and resident nurses (7,85 % p <0,01). Almost a third part of people who work in clinical practice (31,1 %) do not attend at any event, and half of them (14,3 % of the total) do not have a postgraduate degree. 16,84 % say they present the same abstract in several events and this group correlates significantly with those who present more communications (p <0,05) and posters (p <0,05). Only 2,70 % claim to present an extraordinary number of communications in scientifics events (more than 11 in a year). These are significantly younger people (31.8 ± 8.09) with a master's degree and with less professional experience. Only 2,70 % present an extraordinary number of communications and 2,22% poster.

Conclusions:

The unethical practices are clearly related to the incentive for being valued in the employment and profesional careers, especially in youngest nurses.