Chapter 4 – Evaluating Abstracts

Whether looking for research articles in library databases or using a specialized search engine like Google Scholar, one is likely to find dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of articles on any topic of interest. To help consumers of research decide if the article provides information about what they are looking for, article titles should be concise, specific, free of jargon or acronyms, while also mentioning such key attributes of the study as variables, participants, underlying theory, or any other special features that make the study stand out among other studies on the same topic. Moreover, caution should be exercised when the title implies causality or starts with a clever or catchy phrase not carrying important information about the study. These are the evaluation questions that this chapter applies to article titles, along with explanations and examples. The end-of-chapter exercises also provide a nice variety of actual article titles from studies recently published in academic journals in order to practice the evaluation criteria discussed in the chapter.