| Take-home: recent research unexpectedly found that papers with longer, wordier abstracts tended to have more citations. But that doesn’t mean that scientists should deliberately write ‘indigestible’ abstracts. |
A 2015 article by Weinberger et al. found that papers with abstracts that follow standard ‘rules’ (e.g., ‘keep it short’, ‘keep it simple’, ‘keep it compact’) tended to have fewer citations. The result was not uniform across disciplines or across all ten rules they examined but, overall, was both striking and strongly counterintuitive.
The authors suggest—possibly with tongues-in–cheek—that:
‘Scientists are skeptical by disposition, and this exercise shows that, rather than taking advice at face value, they can apply the same machinery they use to interrogate nature to put these recommendations to the test—and write a lengthy, convoluted, highly-indexible, self-describing abstract.’
They based their analysis on an automated survey of more than one million abstracts across eight disciplines. They suggested that the results were probably explained by search engines favouring longer abstracts (‘longer, more detailed, prolix prose is simply more available for search’).
I wonder whether an attentive read of a much smaller sample, with metrics more sophisticated than, for example, sentence length, would have produced different results. Either way, the above comment makes sense only if scientists’ aim is to achieve high citation rates. What scientists should seek is to have both high citation rates and to ensure that their papers communicate the results of their research accurately and readably. This aim cannot be achieved by writing convoluted abstracts.