Blog: Hilda Bastian: "Bad and Good(-ish) News on the Abstract Spin Cycle"

"Abstracts are central to the science communication process. The words in them can lead searchers to find a paper. Because they’re the most read part, their messages can be the only take-aways. And they can determine whether or not someone goes on to read more of the work. If they’re free to read and the rest of the paper is behind a paywall, it won’t even be possible for everyone to go further.

All of which makes spin in abstracts a menace, whether it’s misleading cherry-picked content – like including the only “significant” result – or garden-variety hype. When I last wrote a post on the evidence about abstracts, Isabelle Boutron and colleagues had reported on a trial randomizing cancer clinicians to evaluate abstracts of clinical trials with and without spin. The participants were all themselves corresponding authors of clinical trials, so not your average clinicians. They were more likely to say a treatment was beneficial if they’d read an abstract with spin – but also more likely to want to see the full paper."

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2022/08/30/bad-and-good-ish-news-on-the-abstract-spin-cycle/

 

If people cannot be relied upon to summarise, accurately, their research and results, why would one rely upon their full, unsummarised reports?

 

Once you have been caught making findings up in your abstracts any respectable journal should blacklist you completely. Why continue to let dishonest actors publish false papers, it only hurts the reputation of the journal at that stage and more widely science. When someone tells you who they are the first time you should believe them.

 

Difficult to make something contractual on "unpaid" peer reviewers. Of course journals could start paying for peer reviews but then that might upset the business structure of academic journal publishing which is based on extracting as much value for the publishers as Government funding and the student fee supported Higher Education market will stand.