The present study aimed to assess the quality of some abstracts of articles published online. To achieve that objective, the researcher employed observation as the main data collection tool. He read some articles published in different journals and noticed that the research elements which should be present in the abstracts were either missing or stated vaguely and the language of the abstracts was conspicuously poor. The findings revealed that the abstracts did not include the basic elements of research abstracts and had many serious linguistic errors. This led the researcher to conclude that the journals did not do much editorial work to improve the quality of articles which they accepted for publication probably because they cared about increasing their financial revenues more than following academic standards. The researcher recommends that more large-scale research be conducted on this topic to exert some pressure on journals to raise their academic standards.
Keywords: abstract elements, abstracts, academic journals, linguistic errors
