Comparing data accuracy between structured abstracts and full-text journal articles: implications in their use for informing clinical decisions

Fontelo, Paul; Gavino, Alex; Sarmiento, Raymond Francis

doi:10.1136/eb-2013-101272

Cited by 26 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…[18][19][20][21] This is especially prevalent in lowresource regions of the world where full-text articles may not be available whereas abstracts are. Smartphones and the ubiquitous mobile internet have contributed further to the device's popularity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comparisons made between full-text articles and abstracts have shown that abstracts may contain inaccuracies, but these were minor errors and did not seem to affect the clinical bottom line. 18 Search tools, such as Consensus Abstracts, have been developed to present abstracts and TBLs assembled and viewed together for convenient reading and also to improve their validity. 10 Although the modified PubMed4Hh interface allows users to view TBLs and abstracts, and provides links back to the full-text articles in PubMed Central and publishers' sites, we are only able to compare the participants' scores and feedback for TBLs and abstracts because tracking full-text preferences is not possible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How does evidence affect clinical decision-making?

Fontelo

Liu

2015

Evid Based Med

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 1998, the "Evidence Cart" was introduced to provide decision-support tools at the point of care. A recent study showed that a majority of doctors who previously stated that evidence was not needed sought it nevertheless when it was easily available. In this study, invited clinicians were asked to rate the usefulness of evidence provided as abstracts and "the bottom-line summaries" (TBL) using a modified version of a Web app for searching PubMed and then specify reasons how it might affect their clinical decision-making. The responses were captured in the server's log. One hundred and one reviews were submitted with 22 reviews for abstracts and 79 for TBLs. The overall usefulness Likert score (1=least useful, 7=most useful) was 5.02±1.96 (4.77±2.11 for abstracts and 5.09±1.92 for TBL). The basis for scores was specified in only about half (53/101) of reviews. The most frequent single reason (32%) was that it led to a new skill, diagnostic test, or treatment plan. Two or more reasons were given in 16 responses (30.2%). Two-thirds more responders used TBL summaries than abstracts confirming further that clinicians prefer convenient easy-to-read evidence at the point of care. This study seems to show similar results as the Evidence Cart study on the usefulness of evidence in clinical decision-making. Keywordsevidence-based medicine; clinical decision-making; Web app; journal abstract; "the bottom line"

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does evidence affect clinical decision-making?

Fontelo

Liu

2015

Evid Based Med

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Third, variations in the length of abstract and inaccuracy in the content of the abstract might potentially influence our results. [22] …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cancer studies based on secondary data analysis of the Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There has been a surge in the academic publication output based on secondary analyses of the data from the Taiwan's National Health Insurance claim records. It has become a challenge to comprehend such a rapid expansion of the literature. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the conceptual content of National Health Insurance Research Database-based cancer research, using the abstract of articles extracted from PubMed between 2002 and 2015. Search terms including “National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) AND Taiwan,” “Taiwan AND population-based,” and “Taiwan AND nationwide” were used to search in PubMed with the publication date limited to between 1997 and 2015. The retrieved articles were manually screened to retain only those that were cancer-related and were based on secondary data analysis of the NHIRD. A total 589 articles were selected for subsequent text mining using the R software. Among the 589 articles, the top 5 most studied cancer types were breast (16.3%), lung (11.4%), colorectal (10.4%), liver (8.3%), and prostate (7.5%). The articles that received the highest number of citations by PubMed Central articles were cited 92 times. The top 3 most frequently occurred keywords in the abstracts of the 589 articles were cancer, patient, and risk, with 3670, 2535, and 1652 times, respectively. Analysis of key conception indicated that the most common conceptions were diabetes, survival, breast cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer. In conclusion, in this study of 589 published articles on secondary data analysis of the NHIRD, indexed by PubMed between 2002 and 2015, we found that while the risk factors of cancer, treatment of cancer, and survival of cancer patients were popular research topics, end-of-life cancer care issues were less studied. Further studies should explore these areas since they are as important as treatment of the disease itself for many patients.

show abstract

“…As demonstrated by Fontelo et al (2013), "structured abstracts appear to be informative." One of the metrics considering document structure is BM25F (Robertson et al, 2004) which is a field-based extension of Okapi's BM25 widely used in information retrieval.…”

Section: Automatic Metrics For Summary Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The abstract has been the subject of many research projects, including attempts to evaluate their quality (Narine et al, 1991;Timmer et al, 2003;Sharma and Harrison, 2006;Prasad et al, 2012;Fontelo et al, 2013). In the past two decades, researchers have carried out a number of studies on structured abstracts from different perspectives, and compared abstracts in biomedical journals with those from social sciences journals (see review of James Hartley's research on structured abstracts; Zhang and Liu, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the Abstract a Mere Teaser? Evaluating Generosity of Article Abstracts in the Environmental Sciences

Ermakova

Bordignon

Turenne³

et al. 2018

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An abstract is not only a mirror of the full article; it also aims to draw attention to the most important information of the document it summarizes. Many studies have compared abstracts with full texts for their informativeness. In contrast to previous studies, we propose to investigate this relation based not only on the amount of information given by the abstract but also on its importance. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new metric called GEM to measure the "generosity" or representativeness of an abstract. Schematically speaking, a generous abstract should have the best possible score of similarity for the sections important to the reader. Based on a questionnaire gathering information from 630 researchers, we were able to weight sections according to their importance. In our approach, seven sections were first automatically detected in the full text. The accuracy of this classification into sections was above 80% compared with a dataset of documents where sentences were assigned to sections by experts. Second, each section was weighted according to the questionnaire results. The GEM score was then calculated as a sum of weights of sections in the full text corresponding to sentences in the abstract normalized over the total sum of weights of sections in the full text. The correlation between GEM score and the mean of the scores assigned by annotators was higher than the correlation between scores from different experts. As a case study, the GEM score was calculated for 36,237 articles in environmental sciences retrieved from the French ISTEX database. The main result was that GEM score has increased over time. Moreover, this trend depends on subject area and publisher. No correlation was found between GEM score and citation rate or open access status of articles. We conclude that abstracts are more generous in recent publications and cannot be considered as mere teasers. This research should be pursued in greater depth, particularly by examining structured abstracts. GEM score could be a valuable indicator for exploring large numbers of abstracts, by guiding the reader in his/her choice of whether or not to obtain and read full texts.

show abstract

Comparing data accuracy between structured abstracts and full-text journal articles: implications in their use for informing clinical decisions

Abstract: The inaccuracies do not seem to affect the conclusion and interpretation overall. Structured abstracts appear to be informative and may be useful to practitioners as a resource for guiding clinical decisions.

Cited by 26 publications

References 37 publications

How does evidence affect clinical decision-making?

How does evidence affect clinical decision-making?

Cancer studies based on secondary data analysis of the Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database

Is the Abstract a Mere Teaser? Evaluating Generosity of Article Abstracts in the Environmental Sciences

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About