No abstract available bias

No abstract available bias, or NAA bias, refers to failures in academic research and academic publishing, whereby researchers will often ignore articles that could have a high degree of relevance, if they do not have an abstract available. This problem is amplified by the lack of search engines for academic material that rival the quality of regular internet search engines such as Yahoo, Google, or Bing. When searching for a given phenomenon, often many spurious results are gleaned. This overload of information will likely cause the researcher to discard any returned results that can not be fully qualified – as is the case of a returned article that lacks an abstract. With only the title on which to base the article's relevance, this reduces the search results' value.

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