Titles and Abstracts, and What a Database Indexes

Academic and student work · 728 words · about 3 minutes to read

Databases index two parts of a scientific paper and leave the rest alone. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors says why the abstract matters in exactly those terms. Abstracts are the only substantive portion of the article indexed in many electronic databases, and the only portion many readers read.¹

The title carries the same weight for the same reason. ICMJE describes it as a distilled description of the complete article, and asks that it include information which, with the abstract, makes electronic retrieval sensitive and specific.¹

Sensitive and specific are retrieval terms rather than writing terms. They mean the paper is found when it should be, and not found when it should not, which are two separate failures with two separate causes.

The limits are numbers, and they are published

PLOS ONE sets a full title of no more than 250 characters and a short title of no more than 100. Titles are set in sentence case, capitalizing only the first word, proper nouns, and genus names. The abstract must not exceed 300 words, must not include citations, and should avoid abbreviations where possible.²

ICMJE adds a rule that catches authors trying to compress a long title: avoid abbreviations in the title.¹ An abbreviation saves characters and costs retrieval, because a searcher who spells the term out does not match it.

Every one of those is checkable before submission by counting, and none requires knowing the field. Editors Canada places that kind of verification inside copy editing.³

What an abstract has to contain

ICMJE describes the content for original research, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses, which require structured abstracts. The abstract should give the context or background and state the study's purposes. It should describe the basic procedures, including selection of subjects and the observational and analytical methods. It should give the main findings with specific effect sizes and their statistical significance where possible, and the principal conclusions.¹

It also asks authors to ensure the abstract accurately reflects the content of the article, for the reason quoted at the top: for many readers and many databases, it is the article.¹

That instruction is the one an editor can act on most usefully. Accuracy here means agreement between two parts of the same document, which is checkable without knowing the subject.

The four disagreements worth checking

An abstract is written first, revised last, and frequently left behind by the paper it summarizes. The four checks below take an hour between them.

The first check is numbers. A figure in the abstract should match the figure in the results, and on a paper with several authors it often does not. Editors Canada's copy editing standards cover this directly, including checking calculations and conversions.⁴

The second is the sample. An abstract describing a population the methods section does not describe is the most consequential mismatch of the four, because it is the version most people will read.

The third is the conclusion. An abstract stating a claim more strongly than the discussion does has overstated the paper, and the overstatement travels further than the paper.

The fourth is terminology. A term used one way in the abstract and another way in the body will be indexed under the abstract's version.

Why the title is a retrieval decision rather than a style decision

Three habits reduce retrieval, and all three are visible on the page. None of them is a fault in the writing.

Declarative titles that state the finding without naming the subject can be memorable and hard to find, because the searchable terms are missing. Titles that open with a general phrase before reaching the subject bury the terms a database weights. And titles carrying an unexplained abbreviation lose every searcher who spells it out.

None of that is a judgment about the research. It is a set of observations about the words, and the destination publishes the constraints they must fit.²

Where the author decides

Whether the finding is correctly stated, whether the effect size is right, and whether the conclusion follows from the data are the authors' determinations and their reviewers'. An editor who adjusted a claim in an abstract would be changing the paper.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including manuscripts under review, unpublished data, and correspondence with a journal. We work on journal articles and academic and research documents against whatever the destination publishes.

Authors who revise the abstract last, after the discussion is settled, generally submit a truer one. The common order is the opposite, and it is why the abstract and the paper so often describe slightly different studies.

References

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Recommendations: Preparing a Manuscript for Submission to a Medical Journal. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/manuscript-preparation/preparing-for-submission.html ↩
PLOS ONE, Submission Guidelines. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024: D. Standards for Copy Editing. https://editors.ca/publications/professional-editorial-standards/copy-editing/ ↩

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