Medical English abstracts: How well are they structured?

✍ Scribed by Salager-Meyer, Françoise

• Book ID: 102653746
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 507 KB
• Volume: 42
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199108)42:7<528::aid-asi7>3.0.co;2-2

✦ Synopsis

In the last few years, the editors of some leading biomedical journals have urged medical researchers to structure the abstracts of the papers they send for publication in such a way that key aspects of purpose, methods, and results be consistently described in a standardized manner with prominent headings. General guidelines for research papers and review articles have then been suggested. In order to find out what the actual internal structuring of medical English abstracts is, we carried out a "move analysis" of 77 abstracts published between 1987 and 1989. Our results show that 48% of the abstracts studied were "poorly structured" in the sense that they presented some sort of discoursal deficiency. Because abstracts assume such a pivotal role in scientific communication, medical researchers should pay a much closer attention to the way they structure their abstracts.