Friday, November 09, 2007

I love articles in medicine and public health journals.

I especially love them when I am trying to read an article quickly. Not only do they tend to be on the short side, their abstracts are much cooler than social science abstracts. They tell you, in individual sections, yet briefly, the research questions, the methods, the results, and the conclusions. I suppose that they realize that their primary audience (professional practitioners, not necessarily academics) does not really care to read 50 pages of their rambling. Go them!

(Not all journals in those fields are like that, but the few I've had exposure to [granted, not being among their primary audience] have conformed to this pattern of practical, summarizing abstracts and short texts.)

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