Review of James Hartley’s research on structured abstracts

Structured abstracts have been employed in biomedical journals for more than 20 years. Professor James Hartley in the School of Psychology, Keele University, UK has published over 25 research papers and conducted systematic studies on structured abstracts. This paper reviews this research from five perspectives: the advantages of structured abstracts over traditional ones, the typographic layout of structured abstracts, the content of structure abstracts, the application of structured abstracts to medical, non-medical and social science journals, and evaluating the quality of structured abstracts. Our aim is to achieve a fuller understanding of what is known about structured abstracts in this field by summarizing James Hartley’s research.