Abstract
To evaluate the quality of abstracts of original non-experimental research articles in Brazilian Journals in Surgery. Convenience sample of 471 abstracts of original research articles from six Brazilian surgical journals indexed in Thomson Reuters (ISI) Web of Knowledge. The quality of abstracts was measured against a checklist of eight evaluation criteria, which were divided into 32 categories. The total score for each abstract was obtained by summing the score of all criteria present. The overall mean score was also determined. The overall mean score of abstract quality was that of a good abstract. Most of the abstracts contained some information from each of the eight basic categories of an abstract. All abstracts were structured ones. The overall quality, for abstracts of original articles of six Brazilian non-experimental journals in surgery, was classified as good.
Highlights
MethodsAn article’s abstract is a powerful tool for the reader as well as the author[1]
The consistent interpretation of the criteria was discussed but communication between the raters was avoided during evaluation
We assessed the quality of a convenience sample of structured abstracts from six Brazilian non-experimental journals in surgery
Summary
An article’s abstract is a powerful tool for the reader as well as the author[1]. Except for the title, the part of a scientific article that will be seen and read by the most people is the abstract. Abstracts should provide all the necessary and important information on the research performed (e.g., the studys purpose, design, results and conclusions) They enable readers to review relevant features of the research without having to read the entire report. JAMA and the Canadian Medical Journal were the first to adopt this new role for abstracts, and other journals, including Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine, followed suit soon thereafter Today it is the rare biomedical publication which does not feature a summary or an abstract at the beginning of each major scientific report. In 1987, the Ad Hoc Working Group for Critical Appraisal of the Medical Literature published a proposal for more informative abstracts of clinical articles This structured abstract had seven topics: Objective, Design, Setting, Patients or Participant, Interventions, Measurements and Conclusions[5,6]. The reasons for this were that (a) most biomedical articles may be categorized as original research, (b) original research articles are an important source of new knowledge for health professionals and (c) previous work has been done in developing guidelines for the evaluation of abstracts of original research articles
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