Part II: Dissecting a Scientific Research Paper — the Abstract
When you’re reading a scientific manuscript, the Abstract is a great place to start before reading the full paper, as it gives the reader a quick overview of the main findings and important points of the study. An Abstract is simply a short summary of the entire paper and is usually organized in the same way the full-length paper is structured. Abstracts are often free and easier to find than full-length manuscripts, so sometimes this is all we as readers have to go from!
For this example, we will be reviewing “Smoking Cessation, Weight Change, Type 2 Diabetes, and Mortality.” You’ll see this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August of 2018 and there were a total of 10 authors from multiple institutions who worked on this study.
If you’ve been following along with the example, take a few moments to read through the Abstract.
What did we learn? A few things:
- The goal of the study: This study wanted to learn if gaining weight after quitting smoking lowers the overall health benefits from quitting.
- How the study was done: The study used three large groups of men and women in the U.S. and identified those who reported they quit smoking. They measured changes in smoking status and body weight. The researchers then made an educated guess about the risk that people who quit might experience:
- getting type 2 diabetes
- dying from heart disease, and
- dying due to any cause
3. Main findings: The authors found that the risk of getting type 2 diabetes was higher in the group that had recently quit smoking compared to the group who was still smoking. But, this was directly related to weight gain, meaning the more weight a person gained after quitting smoking, the higher their chance of getting diabetes. For recent quitters who did not gain weight, the risk of developing diabetes did NOT increase. No matter what a person’s risk of getting diabetes was, quitting smoking did not increase their likelihood of dying.
4. Conclusion: The researchers concluded that people who gained weight after quitting smoking had a higher chance of getting type 2 diabetes for a short while, but that even with this higher chance, it did not lessen the benefits of quitting smoking on mortality.
To summarize — the Abstract gives us a nice overview of what’s to come in the paper, such as how the study was conducted and the research findings, which we’ll dive into in more detail in upcoming posts. Next time we’ll review the Introduction and Methods sections.
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Reference:
Hu Y, Zong G, Liu G, Wang M, Rosner B, Pan A, Willett WC, Manson JE, Hu FB, Sun Q. Smoking cessation, weight change, type 2 diabetes, and mortality. N Engl J Med 2018;379(7):623–632: doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1803626.
Read the remaining installments of this educational series by clicking below:
