Brazilian Scientific Journals in Surgery: quality control in the abstract structure of non-experimental articles

PURPOSE: To evaluate the quality of abstracts of original non-experimental research articles in Brazilian Journals in Surgery. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: The overall quality, for abstracts of original articles of six Brazilian non-experimental journals in surgery, was classified as good.Rio de Janeiro Federal University School of Medicine Department of SurgeryUNIFESP Central LibraryUniversity City of São PauloUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Biblioteca do Campus São Paulo, EPM, São Paulo, BrazilSciEL

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Data Holdings

Since its inception in 1993, the ADS Abstract Service has become an indispensable research tool for astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide. In those seven years, much effort has been directed toward improving both the quantity and the quality of references in the database. From the original database of approximately 160,000 astronomy abstracts, our dataset has grown almost tenfold to approximately 1.5 million references covering astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, physics, optics, and engineering. We collect and standardize data from approximately 200 journals and present the resulting information in a uniform, coherent manner. With the cooperation of journal publishers worldwide, we have been able to place scans of full journal articles on-line back to the first volumes of many astronomical journals, and we are able to link to current version of articles, abstracts, and datasets for essentially all of the current astronomy literature. The trend toward electronic publishing in the field, the use of electronic submission of abstracts for journal articles and conference proceedings, and the increasingly prominent use of the World Wide Web to disseminate information have enabled the ADS to build a database unparalleled in other disciplines. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 24 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables, 3 appendice

Current Literature: Titles and Abstracts

The purpose of this department in The Linacre Quarterly is to make available by titular listing such current articles as are thought to be of particular interest to the Catholic physician by virtue of their medical literature although, of necessity, this source is the most fruitful. When abstracts appear, they are intended to reflect the content of the original article. Parenthetical editorial comment may follow the abstract if considered desirable. Contributions from readers are invited

Current Literature: Titles and Abstracts

The purpose of this department in The Linacre Quarterly is to make available by titular listing such current articles as are thought to be of particular interest to the Catholic physician by virtue of their medical literature although, of necessity, this source is the most fruitful. When abstracts appear, they are intended to reflect the content of the original article. Parenthetical editorial comment may follow the abstract if considered desirable. Contributions from readers are invited

Current Literature: Titles and Abstracts

The purpose of this department in The Linacre Quarterly is to make available by titular listing such current articles as are thought to be of particular interest to the Catholic physician by virtue of their medical literature although, of necessity, this source is the most fruitful. When abstracts appear, they are intended to reflect the content of the original article. Parenthetical editorial comment may follow the abstract if considered desirable. Contributions from readers are invited

How well do structured abstracts reflect the articles they summerize?

Background: evidence-based medicine requires critical appraisal of published research. This is often done by reading the abstracts alone of published papers. This study examined how well structured abstracts reflect the articles they summarize in medical journals.Methods: a total of 20 papers reporting original randomized trials were obtained from four general medical journals. Key study details, results, and conclusions were extracted from the full articles. Abstracts were examined to see what information from the article was included, and they were scrutinized for inaccuracies, data not presented in the main body, and ambiguous statements.Results: nineteen abstracts (95%; 95% CI 75 to 100%) correctly stated the primary outcome. Eight abstracts (40%; 19% to 64%) were deficient in some way. Three (15%; 3% to 38%) contained incorrect or inconsistent figures or data. Six abstracts (30%; 12% to 54%) contained data not present in the full article.Discussion: almost half of the abstracts studied contained some data inconsistent with the full article, or missing altogether. Authors and editors need to ensure that abstracts are of a high quality and accurately reflect the papers they are summarizing. CONSORT guidelines provide helpful indications as to what should be included in abstracts reporting clinical trial

Formulating MEDLINE queries for article retrieval based on PubMed exemplars

Bibliographic search engines allow endless possibilities for building queries based on specific words or phrases in article titles and abstracts, indexing terms, and other attributes. Unfortunately, deciding which attributes to use in a methodologically sound query is a non-trivial process. In this paper, we describe a system to help with this task, given an example set of PubMed articles to retrieve and a corresponding set of articles to exclude. The system provides the users with unigram and bigram features from the title, abstract, MeSH terms, and MeSH qualifier terms in decreasing order of precision, given a recall threshold. From this information and their knowledge of the domain, users can formulate a query and evaluate its performance. We apply the system to the task of distinguishing original research articles of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of sensorimotor function from fMRI studies of higher cognitive functions

Rhetorical Variation in Medical Article Abstracts Written in English and Persian

The present study aimed at finding structural variations in the translated abstracts from Persian into English and comparing them with abstracts originally written in English and published in international journals in the area of medical sciences. To do this, 64 medical article abstracts (32 in Iranian journals, 32 in international journals) were analyzed and compared on the basis of Swales’ model (1990). More detailed analysis was done in the Introduction unit regarding CARS model (Swales, 1990) and also language features of each unit were identified. The IMRC (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion) sequence was considered as the structural conventions for the analysis. The results showed that in terms of structural units, there was a significant difference in using the Methods unit between the two groups of abstracts (p= 0.002). Some variations were observed in the Introduction unit and language features. The data revealed that the translated abstracts from Persian into English in research medical articles meet the determined criteria for scientific writing while the original ones often ignore the criteria, although they are linguistically superior to the original English one

Is that what they said? An automated reference finder

This work investigates the feasibility of using freely available online resources to create an application that can automatically discover and display original source articles that a student cites and references. A prototype application was created that used CiteSeerExtractor to extract reference details from the student work, and then used Crossref.org to return web page addresses of the original journal articles or abstracts. Initial results successfully demonstrate that the idea is effective. It is concluded that further development would result in a useful tool for assisting in the marking of student work

<原著>歯科医薬品情報に関する検討 : 最近5年間のYear Book of Dentistryを中心に

The Year Book of Dentistry appears annually, providing a review of dental articles. We surveyed the abstracts of the recent 5 volumes of the Year Book of Dentistry, from 1985 to 1989. Two hundred and eighty articles were abstracted in each volume, divided into about 13 categories. The proportion of abstracts concerned with drugs and drug therapies (here termed drug information) was almost 20% in all volumes. Most of the drug information appeared under the heading "Oral Mdicine and Oral Pathology" (63%). The original articles for the abstracts were from many journals, but 70% of the drug information articles were from JADA, Oral Surgery, and 10 other journals. The classification of the drugs in the drug information were: drugs for dental treatment, antibacterials, antiinflammatories, hemostatics, anesthetics, and others. Oral manifestations of systemic diseases or side effects of drugs used for these diseases were also abstracted. There were numerous articles of systemic diseases, due to dental treatments, including infective, hematologic diseases. The study concludes that it is critical for the dentist to be aware of patient\u27s systemic diseases and the drug used in treating these. The drug information was included in the clinical training of dental students in the hospital pharmacy