Natural News

Are Abstracts Accurate?

You can't judge a journal article by its abstract. That's what researchers discovered when they assessed whether the abstracts that accompany research articles accurately reflect their content. Abstracts were inaccurate, on average, 43 percent of the time.

Researchers randomly selected 44 articles from each of five medical journals—Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine—published between July 1, 1996, and June 30, 1997, as well as all 44 articles from Canadian Medical Association Journal published between July 1, 1996, and Aug. 15, 1997. All articles were at least two journal pages long and had abstracts.

The results, published in JAMA [1999 Mar 24-31;281(12):1110-1], showed that between 18 and 68 percent of the 264 abstracts evaluated from major medical journals were inaccurate, meaning there were omissions or inconsistencies between the data in the abstract and the data in the body, tables and figures of the main article.

In a separate editorial in the same issue, Margaret A. Winker, M.D., deputy editor of JAMA, says the results are "especially troubling because abstracts are widely used, often separate from their text, as in MEDLINE and other databases, and data taken from the abstracts may be reported and disseminated in other works, in other formats and in the media."