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42-476: An executive summary was formerly known as a summary. It differs from an abstract in that an abstract will usually be shorter and is typically intended as an overview or orientation rather than being a condensed version of the full document. Abstracts are extensively used in academic research where the concept of the executive summary is not in common usage. "An abstract is a brief summarizing statement... read by parties who are trying to decide whether or not to read

84-643: A United States federal court decision resulted in the release of approximately 1500 documents detailing how articles highlighting specific marketing messages written by unattributed writers, but "authored" by academics, are strategically placed in the medical literature – a practice known as ghostwriting . To release these documents, PLOS Medicine , represented by the public interest law firm Public Justice, and The New York Times , acted as "intervenors" in litigation against menopausal hormone manufacturers by women who developed breast cancer while taking hormones. PLOS Medicine argued that sealed documents identified during

126-449: A body of literature for that particular subject. The terms précis or synopsis are used in some publications to refer to the same thing that other publications might call an "abstract". In management reports, an executive summary usually contains more information (and often more sensitive information) than the abstract does. Academic literature uses the abstract to succinctly communicate complex research. An abstract may act as

168-412: A communication tool in both academia and business. For example, members of Texas A&M University 's Department of Agricultural Economics observe that "An executive summary is an initial interaction between the writers of the report and their target readers: decision makers, potential customers, and/or peers. A business leader’s decision to continue reading a certain report often depends on the impression

210-536: A leading medical journal rejected this paper because of ethical concerns around how the trial was conducted before PLOS Medicine accepted it. The trial was stopped early by the Data and Safety Monitoring Board who advised the investigators to interrupt the trial and offer circumcision to the control group. The trial estimated that male circumcision protected 60% (95% CI: 32%–76%) for female-to-male HIV transmission. The results of this trial along with two others led to

252-505: A recent study statistically comparing publications with or without graphical abstracts with regard to several output parameters reflecting visibility failed to demonstrate an effectiveness of graphical abstracts for attracting attention to scientific publications. Various methods can be used to evaluate abstract quality, e.g. rating by readers, checklists), and readability measures (such as Flesch Reading Ease ). PLOS Medicine PLOS Medicine (formerly styled PLoS Medicine )

294-452: A research article, thesis , review, conference proceeding , or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose. When used, an abstract always appears at the beginning of a manuscript or typescript, acting as the point-of-entry for any given academic paper or patent application . Abstracting and indexing services for various academic disciplines are aimed at compiling

336-533: A short comment and a longer analysis. Ioannidis has answered this critique. A profile of Ioannidis' work including a discussion of his 2005 paper appeared in the November 2010 issue of The Atlantic . The first randomized controlled trial to assess the effect of male circumcision on female to male HIV transmission was published in 2005 by Bertran Auvert and colleagues in PLOS Medicine . The Lancet

378-672: A simple reading of complex issues" and "to depoliticise and universalize all sorts of differences". She claims that "all research was framed under pre-defined and generic headings, such as business case points. The partners' reports were supposed to look the same. The standardization of research occurred via vehicles such as executive summaries: 'executives only read the summaries' we were told". Similarly Colin Leys , writing in The Socialist Register , argues that executive summaries are used to present dumbed down arguments: "there

420-489: A stand-alone entity instead of a full paper. As such, an abstract is used by many organizations as the basis for selecting research that is proposed for presentation in the form of a poster, platform/oral presentation or workshop presentation at an academic conference . Most bibliographic databases only index abstracts rather than providing the entire text of the paper. Full texts of scientific papers must often be purchased because of copyright and/or publisher fees and therefore

462-602: Is a peer-reviewed weekly medical journal covering the full spectrum of the medical sciences . It began operation on October 19, 2004, as the second journal of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a non-profit open access publisher . All content in PLOS Medicine is published under the Creative Commons "by-attribution" license . To fund the journal, the publication's business model requires in most cases that authors pay publication fees . The journal

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504-522: Is generally agreed that one must not base reference citations on the abstract alone, but the content of an entire paper. This is because abstracts may not be fully representative of the full report or article. Therefore, basing reference citations solely on the information present in the abstract could be misleading. According to the results of a study published in PLOS Medicine , the "exaggerated and inappropriate coverage of research findings in

546-406: Is often expected to tell a complete story of the paper, as for most readers, abstract is the only part of the paper that will be read. It should allow the reader to give an elevator pitch of the full paper. An academic abstract typically outlines four elements relevant to the completed work: It may also contain brief references, although some publications' standard style omits references from

588-414: Is remarkably little adverse comment on the steep decline that has occurred since 1980 in the quality of government policy documents, whose level of argumentation and use of evidence is all too often inversely related to the quality of their presentation (in the style of corporate reports, complete with executive summaries and flashy graphics)." Abstract (summary) An abstract is a brief summary of

630-725: The Tebtunis papyri found in the Ancient Egyptian town of Tebtunis contain abstracts of legal documents. During the Middle Ages , the pages of scholarly texts contained summaries of their contents as marginalia , as did some manuscripts of the Code of Justinian . The use of abstracts to summarise science originates in the early 1800s, when the secretary of the Royal Society would record brief summaries of talks into

672-715: The World Health Organization (WHO) assessing the evidence for male circumcision to prevent HIV transmission. The WHO and UNAIDS subsequently issued recommendations concerning male circumcision and HIV/AIDS including suggestions for government strategic plans, advocacy challenges and exploring the role of new technologies for voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) such as Prepex and other medical devices. Several Ministries of Health along with key stakeholders have committed to scaling up VMMC for HIV prevention in Southern and Eastern Africa. In July 2009,

714-492: The complete abstract , is a compendious summary of a paper's substance and its background, purpose, methodology, results, and conclusion. Usually between 100 and 200 words, the informative abstract summarizes the paper's structure, its major topics and key points. A format for scientific short reports that is similar to an informative abstract has been proposed in recent years. Informative abstracts may be viewed as standalone documents. The descriptive abstract , also known as

756-503: The limited abstract or the indicative abstract , provides a description of what the paper covers without delving into its substance. A descriptive abstract is akin to a table of contents in paragraph form. During the late 2000s, due to the influence of computer storage and retrieval systems such as the Internet , some scientific publications, primarily those published by Elsevier , started including graphical abstracts alongside

798-408: The minutes of each meeting, which were referred to as 'abstracts'. The Royal Society abstracts from 1800 – 1837 were later collated and published in the society's journal Philosophical Transactions , with the first group appearing in 1832. These abstracts were generally one or more pages long. Other learned societies adopted similar practices. The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) may have been

840-534: The abstract as an abstract and not about the work it summarizes: for instance, if you are writing about different styles of writing abstracts used in the sciences and humanities." The history of abstracting dates back to the point when it was felt necessary to summarise the content of documents in order to make the information contained in them more accessible. In Mesopotamia during the early second millennium BCE, clay envelopes designed to protect enclosed cuneiform documents from tampering were inscribed either with

882-423: The abstract is a significant selling point for the reprint or electronic form of the full text. The abstract can convey the main results and conclusions of a scientific article but the full text article must be consulted for details of the methodology, the full experimental results, and a critical discussion of the interpretations and conclusions. Abstracts are occasionally inconsistent with full reports. This has

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924-488: The abstract, reserving them for the article body (which, by definition, treats the same topics but in more depth). Abstract length varies by discipline and publisher requirements. Typical length ranges from 100 to 500 words, but very rarely more than a page and occasionally just a few words. An abstract may or may not have the section title of "abstract" explicitly listed as an antecedent to content. Sometimes, abstracts are sectioned logically as an overview of what appears in

966-487: The accuracy of information reported in a journal abstract with that reported in the text of the full publication have found claims that are inconsistent with, or missing from, the body of the full article." According to the Modern Language Association , there are almost no circumstances in which it is acceptable to cite an abstract: "It only makes sense to cite an abstract if you are writing about

1008-438: The authors to easily explain their papers. Many scientific publishers currently encourage authors to supplement their articles with graphical abstracts, in the hope that such a convenient visual summary will facilitate readers with a clearer outline of papers that are of interest and will result in improved overall visibility of the respective publication. However, the validity of this assumption has not been thoroughly studied, and

1050-482: The category "Medicine, General & Internal". In 2005 PLOS Medicine published an essay by John P. A. Ioannidis entitled " Why Most Published Research Findings Are False ". The essay used a simulation approach to demonstrate that for most study designs and settings it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true due to inherent biases in the way that modern science is conducted. This paper has met much approval, though Goodman and Greenland criticized it in

1092-554: The discovery process for the court case, which demonstrated the practice of ghostwriting, should be made available to the public. The documents were initially made publicly available on the PLOS Medicine website but they are now available as part of the Drug Industry Documents Archive at the University of California, San Francisco . In 2010 PLOS Medicine published the first academic analysis of

1134-435: The documents by Adriane Fugh-Berman. Her article revealed that the pharmaceutical company Wyeth used ghostwritten articles to mitigate the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with menopausal hormone therapy (HT), to defend the unsupported cardiovascular "benefits" of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia , Parkinson's disease , vision problems, and wrinkles. The article

1176-410: The executive summary gives." It has been said that, by providing an easy digest of an often complex matter, an executive summary can lead policy makers and others to overlook important issues. Prof. Amanda Sinclair of the University of Melbourne has argued that this process is often active rather than passive. In one study, centred on globalization, she found that policy makers face "pressures to adopt

1218-577: The first to publish its abstracts: the Monthly Notices of the RAS launched in 1827, containing (among other things) abstracts of talks given at their monthly meetings; the full papers were published months or years later in the Memoirs of the RAS . The RAS abstracts were between one and three paragraphs long. In both cases, these early abstracts were written by the learned society, not the author of

1260-516: The full text of the document or a summary. In the Greco-Roman world , many texts were abstracted: summaries of non-fiction works were known as epitomes , and in many cases the only information about works which have not survived to modernity comes from their epitomes which have survived. Similarly, the text of many ancient Greek and Roman plays commenced with a hypothesis which summed up the play's plot. Non-literary documents were also abstracted:

1302-497: The greatest toll on health globally. In 2009 the journal reaffirmed its scope and noted that it would use an evidence-based approach to give highest priority to studies on diseases and risk factors that cause the greatest burden worldwide. From the outset the journal noted that it would not be part of "the cycle of dependency that has formed between journals and the pharmaceutical industry". The journal does not publish advertisements for pharmaceutical products or medical devices and

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1344-632: The journal's open-access license means that it cannot benefit from exclusive reprint sales. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Index Medicus / MEDLINE / PubMed , the Science Citation Index Expanded , Current Contents /Clinical Medicine, and BIOSIS Previews . According to the Journal Citation Reports , the journal had a 2014 impact factor of 14.429, ranking it 7th out of 153 journals in

1386-478: The main document", while "an executive summary, unlike an abstract, is a document in miniature that may be read in place of the longer document". In common usage the term "executive summary" is a synonym for "summary" and has partially displaced that term. There is general agreement on the structure of an executive summary for business use - books and training courses emphasise similar points. Typically, an executive summary will: Executive summaries are important as

1428-639: The need for access to all clinical trial data held by pharmaceutical companies and regulators, and detailed reasons given by Roche for not sharing data on Tamiflu. In a commissioned perspective article published in the same issue of PLOS Medicine , regulators from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and other national regulatory bodies outlined a shift in their stance on access to clinical trial data but also highlighted challenges that would need to be overcome. The regulators noted, "[w]e consider it neither desirable nor realistic to maintain

1470-502: The news media" is ultimately related to inaccurately reporting or over-interpreting research results in many abstract conclusions. A study published in JAMA concluded that "inconsistencies in data between abstract and body and reporting of data and other information solely in the abstract are relatively common and that a simple educational intervention directed to the author is ineffective in reducing that frequency." Other "studies comparing

1512-467: The paper, with any of the following subheadings: Background, Introduction , Objectives , Methods , Results, Discussion, Conclusions. Abstracts in which these subheadings are explicitly given are often called structured abstracts . Abstracts that comprise one paragraph (no explicit subheadings) are often called unstructured abstracts . Abstracts are important enough that IMRAD is even sometimes recast as AIMRAD . The informative abstract , also known as

1554-686: The paper. Perhaps the earliest example of an abstract published alongside the paper it summarises was the 1919 paper On the Irregularities of Motion of the Foucault Pendulum published in the Physical Review of the American Physical Society , which often published abstracts thereafter. Abstracts are protected under copyright law just as any other form of written speech is protected. Abstract

1596-411: The potential to mislead clinicians who rely solely on the information present in the abstract without consulting the full report. An abstract allows one to sift through copious numbers of papers for ones in which the researcher can have more confidence that they will be relevant to their research. Once papers are chosen based on the abstract, they must be read carefully to be evaluated for relevance. It

1638-495: The status quo of limited availability of regulatory trials data" and concluded, "[w]e welcome debate on these issues, and remain confident that satisfactory solutions can be found to make complete trial data available in a way that will be in the best interest of public health". The article marked a move towards the proactive disclosure of clinical trial data and led to the EMA holding a workshop to establish how this could be done. At

1680-467: The text abstracts. The graphic is intended to summarize or be an exemplar for the main thrust of the article. It is not intended to be as exhaustive a summary as the text abstract, rather it is supposed to indicate the type, scope, and technical coverage of the article at a glance. The use of graphical abstracts has been generally well received by the scientific community . Moreover, some journals also include video abstracts and animated abstracts made by

1722-436: Was published online and in a printed format until 2005 and is now only published online. The journal's acting chief editor is Clare Stone, who replaced the previous chief editor, Larry Peiperl, in 2018. The journal's initial aim was to provide an open-access alternative to existing top-tier journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet and has concentrated on publishing papers on diseases that take

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1764-433: Was subsequently covered by The Guardian . In April 2012 PLOS Medicine published an article by three researchers who were involved in ongoing updates of a Cochrane Collaboration review of neuraminidase inhibitors for treating influenza , describing their experience of trying to gain access to clinical study reports for the antiviral Tamiflu ( oseltamivir ) from the drug's manufacturer Roche . The article outlined

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