The significance of using standard criteria for writing abstracts of articles published in academic journals

This survey aimed at providing a comparative analysis of the abstracts published in Persian journals of LIS and their consistency with APA standards. This survey used a content analysis method. Data were collected through the study of abstracts. Journals included in this study were as follows: Faslname-ye Ketab, Journal of Academic Librarianship and Information Science, Iranian Journal of Information Processing & Management, Library and Information Science Quarterly, Ganjine-ye Asnad, and Research on Information Sciences & Public Libraries. Of each publication, abstracts from 4 recent issues were studied. From a total of245 abstracts, 49.4 percent werestructured and 50.6 percent were unstructured. The mean score for structured abstracts was higher than that of the unstructured ones. Among the journals studied, abstracts published in Faslname-ye Ketabarewere more consistent with APA standards, while abstracts published in the Library and Information Science Quarterly observed the APA format the least. The most frequent omissionsin the abstracts studied was related to information about ''conclusions" and the least frequent omissions belonged to the "purpose". It was revealed that most of the Persian journals of LIS use structured abstracts, although the structures used were not thesame. Based on the findings, it seems that a structured formatincreases the quality of abstracts.