Common weaknesses in traditional abstracts in the social sciences

Detailed checklists and questionnaires have been used in the past to assess the quality of structured abstracts in the medical sciences. The aim of this article is to report the findings when a simpler checklist was used to evaluate the quality of 100 traditional abstracts published in 53 different social science journals. Most of these abstracts contained information about the aims, methods, and results of the studies. However, many did not report details about the sample sizes, ages, or sexes of the participants, or where the research was carried out. The correlation between the lengths of the abstracts and the amount of information present was 0.37 (p < .001), suggesting that word limits for abstracts may restrict the presence of key information to some extent. We conclude that authors can improve the quality of information in traditional abstracts in the social sciences by using the simple checklist provided in this article.