Comparing Frequency of Content-Bearing Words in Abstracts and Texts in Articles from Four Medical Journals: An Exploratory Study

BACKGROUND Retrieval tests have assumed that the abstract is a true surrogate of the entire text. However, the frequency of terms in abstracts has never been compared to that of the articles they represent. Even though many sources are now available in full-text, many still rely on the abstract for retrieval. METHODS 1,138 articles with their abstracts were downloaded from Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and the British Medical Journal. Words were extracted from the articles and their abstracts and the frequency of each word was counted in both sources. Each article and its abstract were tested using a chi-squared test to determine if the words in the abstract occurred as frequently as would be expected. RESULTS 96% of the abstracts tested as samples of the article they represented. CONCLUSION In these four journals, the abstracts are lexical, as well as intellectual, surrogates for the documents they represent.