Evaluation of Structured Abstracts in Journals--论文代写范文精选

结构化的抽象表现显著优于传统的测量。因此社会科学中的其他期刊考虑采用结构化的抽象。这篇essay代写范文考虑前面的文摘设置不同格式。这篇文章的文摘是一个结构化的格式。

Background. In 1997 four journals published by the British Psychological Society - the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, the British Journal of Educational Psychology, the British Journal of Health Psychology, and Legal and Criminological Psychology - began publishing structured abstracts.
Aims. The aim of the studies reported here was to assess the effectiveness of these structured abstracts by comparing them with original versions written in a traditional, unstructured, format.
Method The authors of articles accepted for publication in the four journals were asked to supply copies of their original traditional abstracts (written when the paper was submitted) together with copies of their structured abstracts (when the paper was revised). 48 such requests were made, and 30 pairs of abstracts were obtained. These abstracts were then compared on a number of measures.
Results. Analysis showed that the structured abstracts were significantly more readable, significantly longer, and significantly more informative than the traditional ones. Judges assessed the contents of the structured abstracts more quickly and with significantly less difficulty than they did the traditional ones. Almost every respondent expressed positive attitudes to structured abstracts.
Conclusions. The structured abstracts fared significantly better than the traditional ones on every measure used in this enquiry. We recommend, therefore, that the editors of other journals in the social sciences consider the adoption of structured abstracts.

Readers of this article will have noticed that the abstract that precedes it is set in a different format from the ones traditionally employed in academic journals. The abstract to this present article is said to have a structured format. Such structured abstracts contain subheadings - such as background, aims, methods, results and conclusions. From January 1997 four journals published by the British Psychological Society - the British Journal of Clinical Psychology (BJCP), the British Journal of Educational Psychology (BJEP), the British Journal of Health Psychology (BJHP) and Legal and Criminological Psychology (LCP) began to precede their articles with structured abstracts. This was a change of practice for BJCP and BJEP, and a new way of starting for BJHP and LCP.

Why did these journals adopt this practice? Two reasons suggest themselves. First of all, structured abstracts have replaced traditional abstracts in most medical journals and, in that context, they have been subjected to considerable research and evaluation suggesting that they are an improvement over traditional ones. It is likely that the editors of three of the four journals which have clinical content were familiar with these developments. Secondly, additional research conducted with structured abstracts written for psychology journals has also suggested the feasibility of this approach in this context.

Most of the research that has examined the quality of the abstracts has compared traditional abstracts published in journals before the advent of structured ones with the structured ones published at a later date in the same journals (e.g. see Taddio et al, 1994, Hartley and Sydes, 1997). McIntosh (1995), however, was able to compare structured abstracts with traditional ones when the abstracts were written by the same author(s). The traditional abstracts used in this study were those submitted for a forthcoming conference on paediatrics, and the structured abstracts were those that were subsequently requested by the conference organisers for the papers that were accepted. Hartley and Sydes (1997), using a subset of 29 pairs of abstracts from McIntoshs study, found that in this case the structured abstracts had higher readability scores than did the traditional ones.

It is McIntoshs approach that we have used in this paper. We were able to use the opportunity that arose from the fact that the British Psychological Society changed its publishing policy with respect to journal abstracts for the four journals listed above. Accordingly, we were able to write to the authors of papers accepted for publication in these journals for copies of the traditional abstracts that they had initially submitted, and for copies of the structured abstracts that had been requested to write with their revisions.

Method
To obtain the necessary copies of the traditional and structured abstracts the first author of this paper wrote initially to the authors of papers in the first issues of the four relevant journals. He wrote next to Michele Benjamin in the Journals Office of the BPS to enquire whether or not she could let him know the names of the authors of articles that had been accepted for publication in subsequent issues. Finally he addressed this question specifically to the editor of the BJEP - who remains somewhat independent of the BPS Journals office.

In the event 48 letters were written to authors, and 30 replies - with the required pairs of abstracts - were received. (A further eight authors replied that they had not kept copies of their original abstracts). Thus, including these eight, the response rate was approximately 80%.Unfortunately - as Table 1 shows - the distribution of the responses per journal was uneven, and the sample of abstracts was heavily weighted towards the BJEP. This was an outcome of the editor of the BJEP insisting that his contributors rework their abstracts if their articles were to be included in the 1997 volume. The other three editors were more liberal in their requirements, only requiring those authors who still had to make revisions to rewrite their abstracts and accepting traditonal abstracts from those authors who had already had their papers accepted for publication.

Results
The main results of this enquiry are shown in Table 2. It can be seen, for all the measures listed in this table, that the structured abstracts were significantly different from the traditional ones. Thus they were significantly easier to read (as measured by these formulae), they were significantly longer, and they contained significantly more information. Appendix 1 provides the raw data upon which these summary statistics are based in order to give a richer picture of the findings.

The data obtained by timing the students during the evaluation tasks were necessarily crude. The students doing the tasks varied from abstract to abstract, and some did more abstracts than others. Nonetheless, eight students worked on 60 traditional abstracts and took a total of approximately 245 mins (i.e. about 4 minutes for each one.) And five students worked on 43 structured abstracts and took a total of approximately 135 mins (i.e. about 3 mins. for each one.) These data suggest that it was easier to evaluate the structured abstracts than the traditional ones.

An examination of the number of discrepancies between the judges using the evaluation checklist allowed us to check whether or not there might be more discrepancies with the traditional abstracts - assuming that they were harder to read and to evaluate - than with the structured ones. One problem here, of course, was that the evaluation sheets had evolved - the light of the early discrepancies - as the study progressed, and some items were thus worded more precisely in the later versions. Be that as it may, the mean number of discrepancies found between the three judges each responding to the 22 questions per abstract was 4.8 (s.d. 1.8) for the traditional abstracts and 3.4 (s.d. 1.4) for the structured abstracts (t = 3.45, df 29, p < 0.005 one tail test). These data, too, support the notion that the structured abstracts were easier to judge.（essay代写)

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