International Journal of Preventive Medicine (Jan 2010)
How much importance do we give to target audiences in article writing?
Abstract
Objectives: Writing papers can be used as a means to convey a message. Knowledge transfer is also about conveying the right message to the right target audience. The aim of this study was to determine the proportion of articles that had mentioned a clear message and the target audience in the abstract and the article as a whole, and also to examine their association with different deter-minant factors. Methods: Articles published from 2001 to 2006 that were based on clinical and health system research conducted on Iranian popu-lations and on maternal care, diabetes and tuberculosis were searched systematically in domestic and international databases. Eventually checklists (Additional file 1) were completed for 795 articles. Results: Overall, 98.5% of articles had a clear message, whereas 12.5% had addressed the direct target audience. Presence of a clear message 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 in health 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 be an effective intervention for presenting the message in articles.
