Thank you! However, this research does not seem to imply that researchers ONLY read the abstracts. When I do a search on Google Scholar, I may download 30 PDFs, for example. Then I would go through the abstracts and sort away those that: did not claim any empirical evaluation of their results, who did something way outside of the topic I am looking for, or did something I already know about well. But once I do that, I will read the remaining ones from start to finish. The papers you linked indeed seem to confirm that a lousy abstract increases the chances of your paper hitting the bin early but I would never allow myself to derive conclusions about the relevant papers just from the abstract. Related guide: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...
Edit: On top of that, the second study you linked talks about "Altmetric attention scores of the RAs were used to measure the online attention they received". This indicates to me that they studied public interest from the non-academics and not among the academics. Of course, articles submitted to the scientific journal are primarily aimed at the academics in that field. This abstract is an example of how I would bin the article without reading it because it seems to study something I am not interested in. But again, I would not dare comment on its results because I have not read it.
The use of 7–9 year training periods (5 years PhD + 2–4 years postdoc) means a journal article's author and their scientific readership have a lot of shared knowledge and culture, which probably increases the reliability of communication. I agree that pre-publication feedback from peers also helps.
