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      Preliminary results of a study of the completeness and clarity of structured abstracts

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      11th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) (EASE)
      Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)
      2-3 April 2007
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            Abstract

            CONTEXT: Systematic literature reviews largely rely upon using the titles and abstracts of primary studies as the basis for determining their relevance. However, our experience indicates that the abstracts for software engineering papers are frequently of such poor quality they cannot be used to determine the relevance of papers. Both medicine and psychology recommend the use of structured abstracts to improve the quality of abstracts. AIM: This study investigates whether structured abstracts are more complete and easier to understand than non-structured abstracts for software engineering papers that describe experiments. METHOD: We constructed structured abstracts for a random selection of 25 papers describing software engineering experiments. The original abstract was assessed for clarity (assessed subjectively on a scale of 1 to 10) and completeness (measured with a questionnaire of 18 items) by the researcher who constructed the structured version. The structured abstract was reviewed for clarity and completeness by another member of the research team. We used a paired ‘t’ test to compare the word length, clarity and completeness of the original and structured abstracts. RESULTS: The structured abstracts were significantly longer than the original abstracts (size difference =106.4 words with 95% confidence interval 78.1 to 134.7). However, the structured abstracts had a higher clarity score (clarity difference= 1.47 with 95% confidence interval 0.47 to 2.41) and were more complete (completeness difference=3.39 with 95% confidence intervals 4.76 to 7.56). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study are consistent with previous research on structured abstracts. However, in this study, the subjective estimates of completeness and clarity were made by the research team. Future work will solicit assessments of the structured and original abstracts from independent sources (students and researchers).

            Content

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Conference
            April 2007
            April 2007
            : 1-9
            Affiliations
            [0001]Department of Computer Science, Durham University, Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham City, DH1 3LE, UK
            [0002]School of Computing and Mathematics, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
            Article
            10.14236/ewic/EASE2007.7
            9e42f8aa-b0bb-462a-b74e-4141e612f9a9
            © David Budgen et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 11th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), Keele University, UK

            This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

            11th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)
            EASE
            11
            Keele University, UK
            2-3 April 2007
            Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)
            Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)
            History
            Product

            1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

            Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EASE2007.7
            Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/
            Categories
            Electronic Workshops in Computing

            Applied computer science,Computer science,Security & Cryptology,Graphics & Multimedia design,General computer science,Human-computer-interaction

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