Everybody * scans papers for the piece of info they happen to be searching for, before reading it in any detail. The abstract should contain that, but might not

Everybody * scans papers for the piece of info they happen to be searching for, before reading it in any detail. The abstract should contain that, but might not. And nobody * reads the entire abstract anyway. A clinician scanning a medical paper is looking for patient relevance: should they use the approach described? The statistical details are too intimidating, the preamble is irrelevant, they know the scope of the problem already. This is not what "should" happen, but it is what actually happens. The gap between published findings and clinical practice is several years. The peer review and publication process are way out of touch with clinical reality. On top of this, people find articles using Google and read them on their phones. (In reality, they read summarised opinion pieces found via Google.) A systematic reviewer may read papers in full. But even they scan papers for inclusion/exclusion criteria first. The deeper the information is buried, the greater the risk of misclassification. I'm not suggesting that TLDRs will fix this, it's just another data point in why we're seeing TLDRs being created. * "Everybody" and "nobody" here excludes researchers :)