No abstract available bias, or NAA bias, refers to failures in academic research and academic publishing, whereby researchers will often ignore articles that could have a high degree of relevance, if they do not have an abstract available. When searching for a given phenomenon, often many spurious results are gleaned.
This overload of information will likely cause the researcher to discard any returned results that can not be fully qualified – as is the case of a returned article that lacks an abstract. With only the title on which to base the article’s relevance, this reduces the search result’s value.