How Much Importance Do We Give to Target Audiences in Article Writing?

Abstract

Objectives: Writing papers can be used as a means to convey amessage. Knowledge transfer is also about conveying the rightmessage to the right target audience. The aim of this study was todetermine the proportion of articles that had mentioned a clearmessage and the target audience in the abstract and the article as awhole, and also to examine their association with different determinantfactors.Methods: Articles published from 2001 to 2006 that were basedon clinical and health system research conducted on Iranian populationsand on maternal care, diabetes and tuberculosis weresearched systematically in domestic and international databases.Eventually checklists (Additional file 1) were completed for 795articles.Results: Overall, 98.5% of articles had a clear message, whereas12.5% had addressed the direct target audience. Presence of a clearmessage in formatted abstracts were seen 3.6 times more (CI95%:1.5-8.7) than in articles without formatted abstracts (p = 0.005).Addressing of the direct target audience was seen twice as much inhealth system research articles as compared to clinical studies,odds ratio was 2.3 (CI95%: 1.47-3.48 ,p<0.001).Conclusions: Creating a format for journal abstracts seems to bean effective intervention for presenting the message in articles.

Keywords

• Knowledge transfer
• Research
• Utilization
• Iran
• Audience
• Message