Thanks for all the points so far, the general feeling appears that you can’t tell much with regard to validity from the abstract.
I liked Brian’s comment:
“There are times when a clinician might need to make decisions and only have abstracts available. One must realize during those times that there is insufficient information to be certain about the validity suggested by the abstract. But the clinical reality is we often have to use our judgment with uncertain information.”
That sums up my perspective very well and is, hopefully, a way of taking the debate forward.
In a scenario where the only information was an abstract – would you all ignore it? Perhaps, if no full-text were available you wouldn’t search at all?
I suppose I’m not looking for absolutes. From an abstract you cannot tell, for definite, if it is valid. In a similar way to, say, a diagnostic lab test – they frequently have uncertainty ‘attached’ – you 'accept' the uncertainty and try and deal with it(as Brian alluded to).
But are there any features of the abstract that might help one be more discerning? Is there no way of reducing the uncertainty associated with using an abstract?
Say you find two abstracts – one says drug X was best, the other says drug Y – both claiming significance. The one that supported drug X was from 1982 in a journal with impact factor of 0.2 and a reported sample size of 20. The other (supporting drug Y) was from 2005 in a journal with impact factor 25 with a sample size of 500?
(I know impact factor doesn’t guarantee validity it was just used for illustrative purposes!)
I imagine most people – if they had to – would go for the 2005 abstract (still accepting that there is uncertainty attached). If you did pick the 2005 abstract – why?
What heuristics did you use? Faced with a full abstract are there other heuristics that may come into play?
The bigger question is can these heuristics be identified and tested to see if they have any validity?
Cheers
jon
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