Brazilian Scientific Journals in Surgery: quality control in the abstract structure of non-experimental articles

PURPOSE: To evaluate the quality of abstracts of original non-experimental research articles in Brazilian Journals in Surgery. METHODS: Convenience sample of 471 abstracts of original research articles from six Brazilian surgical journals indexed in Thomson Reuters (ISI) Web of Knowledge. The quality of abstracts was measured against a checklist of eight evaluation criteria, which were divided into 32 categories. The total score for each abstract was obtained by summing the score of all criteria present. The overall mean score was also determined. RESULTS: The overall mean score of abstract qu...