Percentages of Reports of Clinical Trials, Written in Seven Non-English Languages, that have Structured Abstracts / General Medicine

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Although structured abstracts are becoming common in English-language journals, little is known about papers written in languages other than English.<BR>METHODS: To identify the percentages of reports of clinical trials with structured abstracts that are written in languages other than English, we used the PubMed to retrieve clinical trial reports written in seven languages other than English from 1987 to 2001.<BR>RESULTS: A total of 23, 075 reports of clinical trials written in seven languages other than English were identified. Of the 18, 278 reports that included abstracts, the share of structured abstracts in each language was as follows (entire period and 1999-2001 in parenthesis) German, 17.3% (48.2%) ; French, 16.1% (45.1%) ; Italian, 21.3% (76.3%) ; Spanish, 44.7% (74.9%) ; Russian, 4.9% (17.4%) ; Chinese, 21.3% (100%), and Japanese, 3.5% (10.4%) .<BR>CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed that structured abstracts written in languages other than English have become popular, particularly since the late 1990s. However, the percentages of reports that include structured abstracts differ greatly among these languages.