QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF THESES ABSTRACTS FROM A NURSING MASTER’S DEGREE PROGRAM

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative, descriptive, correlational and retrospective study whose purpose is to assess the quality of theses abstracts from a Nursing Master’s Degree Program in a Chilean university. The study considers 84 abstracts available since 1983-2007. The data was collected for this study using the assessment instrument for scientific articles proposed by Bobenrieth (2002) that considers: title, identification of authors, and the abstract, which were modified for this study. The results show that 85.7% of the abstract authors are nurses working in the academic world and that the methodological approach of the studies is 92.9% quantitative. We found that none of the abstracts evaluated obtained the maximum score. The main deficiencies detected were the number of words in the titles, incomplete author data, and the conclusions, which were unrelated either to the objectives or the results proposed. The correlation between the author’s year of entry into the program and the score obtained in the quality assessment of the theses abstracts was statistically significant (p=0.03). We can conclude that the more recent the year of entry of the student into the program, the higher the scores in the quality of the abstracts. Certain aspects of the different dimensions evaluated need to be improved in order to
increase the quality in the scientific production of the postgraduate program.