Sunan Abī Dāwūd is a collection of ḥadīth compiled by Imām Abū Dāwūd Sulaymān ibn al-Ash ath as-Sijistānī (raḥimahullāh). It is widely considered to be among the six canonical collections of ḥadīth (Kutub as-Sittah) of the Sunnah of the Prophet (saws). It consists of 5274 aḥādīth in 43 books.
In compiling the Sunan, Imām Abū Dāwūd included only those aḥādīth that fall under topics of Fiqh. He included only one or two aḥādīth under each chapter to make the collection concise and easy to derive fiqh.
He occasionally summarized long aḥādīth for brevity, so that the fiqh didn't get lost in the long narration. In his Sunan, he included several aḥādīth that are mursal in instances where he did not know of a contradictory hadith with a connected chain. He did not include aḥādīth from those considered matrūk al-ḥādīth (a narrator whose aḥādīth are rejected). He included a munkar (mistaken or rejected) ḥādīth only when there were no other ḥādīth in that topic. In such cases, he clearly mentioned that the ḥādīth is munkar. He also included some weak aḥādīth in his Sunan, clearly mentioning their weakness.