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Editorials |16 March 2004

Addressing the Limitations of Structured Abstracts

The Editors

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The abstract is, arguably, the most important part of an article in a medical journal because it is the only part of an article that many people read. The abstract is also important because it is the only part of an article that many journals will make accessible through search engines. Through PubMed, for example, the National Library of Medicine disseminates the abstracts of many articles to a worldwide audience. Since the abstract of an article is so important, anything that makes it more useful is a notable contribution to biomedical journalism. The structured abstract is a legitimate candidate for this distinction. It made its debut in 1987 in Annals(1, 2). Today, most general medical journals use structured abstracts.
The elements of a structured abstract are important because they oblige authors to provide basic information that readers need. One stated motivation for imposing structure on abstracts was to help readers evaluate whether an article is methodologically sound and applicable to their needs. A second rationale was to improve the retrieval of literature in electronic searches (3). Comparisons of structured and unstructured abstracts in a variety of medical disciplines show that structured abstracts provide more thorough, more consistent information (4-7). Structured abstracts also help to make electronic searching of the medical literature more precise (8-12). While some investigations have not detected clear advantages to structured abstracts (13, 14), neither have they found disadvantages. Squeezing an article's worth of information into a paragraph will always be...
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The Editors. Addressing the Limitations of Structured Abstracts. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:480–481. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-140-6-200403160-00015

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Published: Ann Intern Med. 2004;140(6):480-481.

DOI: 10.7326/0003-4819-140-6-200403160-00015

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2004 American College of Physicians
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