Striving for Modernity: Layout and Abstracts in the Biomedical Literature

Abstract

Most academic journals have a fairly consistent look: they are structured similarly, their text is divided into similar sections; for example, they have an abstract at the beginning of the manuscript, and their text is usually organized in two columns. There may be different reasons for this similarity, ranging from the need to contain publication costs by using less page space to conforming to an internationally well-accepted format that may be perceived as the hallmark of academic articles. We surveyed 35 medical journals founded before 1960 and looked for their change in format over time and how this was experienced by and explained to readers. We then discussed what recent research has shown about the effects of layout on reading, looking for further explanations as to why this format was so successful.

Linguistic changes in the transition from summaries to abstracts: The case of the Journal of Experimental Medicine

“…Again, these changes occur in JEM, for the most part, around the 1970s, 20 years before the official format switch, and testify how, around those years, summaries changed quite profoundly, both in content and in the language used. This is in agreement with other biomedical journals we surveyed in a recent publication (Galli et al, 2020), which adopted abstracts around that decade. Several hypotheses can be put forth to explain why articles changed so visibly in those years, and a prime suspect is possibly the development of computational methods to handle literature searches, with the Index Medicus progressively transitioning to digital supports.…”

“…Abstracts are such a consistent feature of academic publications that is hard to imagine an article, or a journal, without them. The consistent presence of abstracts, however, is a relatively recent feature of scientific papers, as it was notably absent in many journals published in the 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries (Galli et al, 2020). As the function of abstracts is mainly in literature searches, they evolved on par with the increase in the number of scientific publications.…”

“…Some journals, including the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), marked that transition quite visibly. JEM radically changed its format in the first issue of Volume 172 in 1990 (Galli et al, 2020), and a short piece by the then editor in chief, M. McCarty, explained how the journal's new look better responded to contemporaneous aesthetics, including abstracts at the beginning of each article, which was described as a ‘ touch of modernization ’ ( sic ), although the editor admitted that this choice was also supported by the fact that readers were ‘ now accustomed to look for it in most publications ’ (McCarty, 1990). So, in the case of this journal, we possess a safe terminus post quem to date the appearance of abstracts.…”

The Evolution of Narrativity in Abstracts of the Biomedical Literature between 1989 and 2022

“…Abstracts are a short summary of the content of scientific articles, and they are currently mostly used to screen for articles of interest [2]. We have shown that abstracts have slowly emerged over the last century replacing summaries, which were usually located at the end of a manuscript [3]. The main purpose of a summary was to serve as a mnemonic aid to readers, summing up the main conclusions and takeaway messages from what they had just read in the main body of the text and had therefore often a purely schematic nature, not seldom resorting to bullet points [4].…”