Today, more and more scientific videos are published online. One visual format that seems particularly suitable for communicating scientific content is the video abstract. This is the 3-5 minutes long moving image equivalent of a written abstract. With this format, scientists have the opportunity to explain the results and background of their concrete research work as well as the methods used, the study results, and possible implications to a potentially larger audience. Recently, some studies have been published on this subject, in particular with a focus on content analysis for specific domains and classifications of online videos in general. This paper explores the topic of video abstracts and publishing guidelines in order to answer the following question: „Do authors follow the existing guidelines and are the guidelines sufficient for the publication of a scientific work?“. In a literature and web review we looked at the existing publishing guidelines and extracted the major rules. A database from the most viewed thirty-three video abstracts, published on the TIB AV-Portal was created. Each video was analyzed for different criteria such as link to corresponding paper and research data, length, formats etc.. Results indicate that the most common guidelines were followed by the authors, such as max. 4 minutes length, inclusion of additional relevant material such as images, animations, and lab footage as well as good audio quality. However there is still a lot of potential to get more out of video abstracts e.g. adding a title and a link to the corresponding paper and research data.