Assessment of Systematic Review Abstracts with PRISMA 2020 for Abstracts Checklist

Systematic review abstracts must be clear, understandable, and standardized to accommodate the limited time of readers, reviewers, editors, and researchers. In 2013, a modified version of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” checklist, specifically developed for systematic review abstracts, was released. The aim of this study was to evaluate systematic review abstracts published in journals focused on public health, environmental health, and occupational health, utilizing the PRISMA abstract checklist. It focused on the top seven SCImago-ranked journals (2017–2021) in PubMed, analyzing 96 abstracts while excluding non-systematic reviews and non-PubMed-indexed publications. The analysis covered 12 PRISMA checklist items, citation status, publication year, author affiliation, number of authors, and word count. Over half of the abstracts exceeded 300 words. The median number of authors was seven, with corresponding institutions mostly in the UK and USA. PRISMA citations in abstracts rose from 10–15% (2017–2019) to 65% in 2020. Several checklist items—including title, aims, eligibility criteria, information sources, result synthesis (in methods and results), and interpretation—were appropriately reported in over half of the abstracts. When each of the 12 items of the checklist was scored out of 12 points, the mean scores ranged between 6.53 and 7.50. A moderate positive correlation was found between word count and PRISMA abstract score (r=0.494, p