Traditional or structured abstract, or how to persuade the reader

Abstract

This paper studies the abstract, both traditional and structured, in order to assess its persuasive content through its five information units, as well as the presence of additional information in the Methods unit, in order to determine the abstract pattern that best persuades the reader. The research is based on a corpus of 320 abstracts from Spanish Nursing journals. Among the most significant results, abstract structure variability is highlighted. Also significant is the increase of information provided by structured abstracts, although an increase in size is also observed. From these results we can conclude that it is necessary to unify criteria for a better writing of abstracts, with contents more related to style manual directives in order to make the abstract a persuasive element to continue reading the article.