Re: Journals should increase the allowable abstract word count
David J Preiss suggests that structured abstracts should have more than 250 words. The BMJ allows up to 400 words for a CONSORT-style abstract (this has proved enough to include all the important information), and I agree that we should do the same for a PRISMA abstract.
That 250 limit, used by many journals, probably harks back to the days when Medline cut abstracts off in midstream. But for the past 12 years Medline's been able to handle abstracts of up to about 600 words, as the US National Library of Medicine confirmed to us:
"There have been many changes to the NLM policy on abstracts and the length over the years, which will explain why some of the records you retrieve will have various messages (e.g., ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS or ABSTRACT TRUNCATED).
Effective in January 1996, author abstracts in MEDLINE are no longer truncated based on length of journal article. The only exception will be the occasional abstract that exceeds the maximum number of characters (4,096 [which is about 600 words]) permitted by the NLM online indexing system. And if this occurs, the following message will be at the end of the abstract: (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED).
For additional information on this subject, there is a good (but brief) article, Full Abstracts in MEDLINE in the NLM Technical Bulletin (Sep-Oct 1995 issue) at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/tb.html".
Competing interests:
I'm the BMJ's senior research editor and I maintain our advice to authors
Rapid Response:
Re: Journals should increase the allowable abstract word count
David J Preiss suggests that structured abstracts should have more than 250 words. The BMJ allows up to 400 words for a CONSORT-style abstract (this has proved enough to include all the important information), and I agree that we should do the same for a PRISMA abstract.
That 250 limit, used by many journals, probably harks back to the days when Medline cut abstracts off in midstream. But for the past 12 years Medline's been able to handle abstracts of up to about 600 words, as the US National Library of Medicine confirmed to us:
"There have been many changes to the NLM policy on abstracts and the length over the years, which will explain why some of the records you retrieve will have various messages (e.g., ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS or ABSTRACT TRUNCATED).
Effective in January 1996, author abstracts in MEDLINE are no longer truncated based on length of journal article. The only exception will be the occasional abstract that exceeds the maximum number of characters (4,096 [which is about 600 words]) permitted by the NLM online indexing system. And if this occurs, the following message will be at the end of the abstract: (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED). For additional information on this subject, there is a good (but brief) article, Full Abstracts in MEDLINE in the NLM Technical Bulletin (Sep-Oct 1995 issue) at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/tb.html".
Competing interests: I'm the BMJ's senior research editor and I maintain our advice to authors
Competing interests: No competing interests