1 July 1995 marked 5 years since Haynes and colleagues' explicit recommendations on structured abstracts first appeared [1]. These recommendations were later approved, supported, and endorsed [2]. The scientific community has accepted the recommendations in principle, but it remains to be seen whether the principle was put into practice and, if so, to what extent.

I searched the MEDLINE database for clinical trials appearing in English-language clinical journals published since 1 July 1990. The structured abstracts fit into one of the five following formats: format 1: Objective/Purpose, Design, Setting, Participants/Subjects/Patients, Interventions, Main Outcome Measures/Measurements, Results, and Conclusions; format 2: format 1 without Setting; format 3: format 1 without Interventions; format 4: Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions; and format 5: Purpose in place of Background in format 4.

Table 1 shows the year and format distribution of the included articles. Combined, the obviously more informative formats (1, 2, and 3) were used in less than one tenth of all publications. Formats 4 and 5, however, appeared to have become popular rapidly. In the last 5 years, only 28.5% of the abstracts have been structured. This indicates that most abstracts remain unstructured.

Clinical trials are experiments. Maximum precision is deemed necessary in scientific experiments and in their reports. If more than 70% of the reports of such experiments worldwide are not reported in an ordered fashion, medical journals must adhere to a more stringent strategy for accepting articles. If all journals require every clinical trial report to be accompanied by a structured (format 1) abstract with a limit of 250 words, the uniformity will certainly facilitate both the dissemination and comparison of information. The present trend is to shun abstracts for meta-analysis, a practice that seems justifiable. However, with an ever-increasing demand of evidence-based medicine and more uniformity in reporting clinical trials—apart from the often emphasized advantages—the abstracts may become useful in meta-analytical summaries, if not in meta-analytical policymaking.