Division of General Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic, 200 First Street SW, Rochester, MN, 55905, USA.
Harborview, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
BMC Med Educ. 2017 Nov 9;17(1):193. doi: 10.1186/s12909-017-1048-3.
There is little evidence regarding the comparative quality of abstracts and articles in medical education research. The Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI), which was developed to evaluate the quality of reporting in medical education, has strong validity evidence for content, internal structure, and relationships to other variables. We used the MERSQI to compare the quality of reporting for conference abstracts, journal abstracts, and published articles.
This is a retrospective study of all 46 medical education research abstracts submitted to the Society of General Internal Medicine 2009 Annual Meeting that were subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal. We compared MERSQI scores of the abstracts with scores for their corresponding published journal abstracts and articles. Comparisons were performed using the signed rank test.
Overall MERSQI scores increased significantly for published articles compared with conference abstracts (11.33 vs 9.67; P < .001) and journal abstracts (11.33 vs 9.96; P < .001). Regarding MERSQI subscales, published articles had higher MERSQI scores than conference abstracts in the domains of sampling (1.59 vs 1.34; P = .006), data analysis (3.00 vs 2.43; P < .001), and validity of evaluation instrument (1.04 vs 0.28; P < .001). Published articles also had higher MERSQI scores than journal abstracts in the domains of data analysis (3.00 vs 2.70; P = .004) and validity of evaluation instrument (1.04 vs 0.26; P < .001).
To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare the quality of medical education abstracts and journal articles using the MERSQI. Overall, the quality of articles was greater than that of abstracts. However, there were no significant differences between abstracts and articles for the domains of study design and outcomes, which indicates that these MERSQI elements may be applicable to abstracts. Findings also suggest that abstract quality is generally preserved from original presentation to publication.
医学教育研究中，有关摘要和文章质量的比较证据较少。医学教育研究质量评估工具（MERSQI）是为评估医学教育报告质量而开发的，它在内容、内部结构以及与其他变量的关系方面具有较强的有效性证据。我们使用 MERSQI 比较了会议摘要、期刊摘要和已发表文章的报告质量。
这是一项对 2009 年提交给普通内科医师学会年会的所有 46 篇医学教育研究摘要的回顾性研究，这些摘要随后在同行评议的期刊上发表。我们将摘要的 MERSQI 评分与相应的已发表期刊摘要和文章的 MERSQI 评分进行了比较。比较采用了符号秩检验。
与会议摘要相比，已发表文章的 MERSQI 总分显著提高（11.33 比 9.67；P<0.001），与期刊摘要相比（11.33 比 9.96；P<0.001）。在 MERSQI 子量表方面，与会议摘要相比，发表的文章在抽样（1.59 比 1.34；P=0.006）、数据分析（3.00 比 2.43；P<0.001）和评估工具的有效性（1.04 比 0.28；P<0.001）方面的 MERSQI 评分更高。与期刊摘要相比，发表的文章在数据分析（3.00 比 2.70；P=0.004）和评估工具的有效性（1.04 比 0.26；P<0.001）方面的 MERSQI 评分也更高。
据我们所知，这是首次使用 MERSQI 比较医学教育摘要和期刊文章质量的研究。总体而言，文章的质量大于摘要的质量。然而，在研究设计和结果方面，摘要和文章之间没有显著差异，这表明这些 MERSQI 元素可能适用于摘要。研究结果还表明，摘要的质量在从原始呈现到发表的过程中通常得到保持。
