Communication Skills (1+0)

11.1.2.Purpose of abstracts

 As an aid to the reader. It helps the reader assess the contents of a document without having to read the whole document.

 The reader can narrow the selection of documents based upon their abstracts. It increases the efficiency of searching.

 Professional abstractors Employed by organisations to abstract numerous documents. If they know the subject well enough, they can write a good abstract.

 Authorsmany publications, conferences, ask the author to include an abstract of 100-200 words with the original document. This saves time, but authors are not always good as abstractors.

Abstracting services

Abstracts are used in abstracting services, such as Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA).

This serves –

 current awareness

 retrospective searching

value of an abstract

 Abstract length.

 Abstract orientation

Abstract quality

Nature of the original document

1. Abstract length.

 Long abstracts have more detail. They will be found more often by keyword searches. This may be what the research wants, but it will be have low precision.

Short abstracts are quicker to read. They can be more precise but there will be lower recall.

2. Abstract orientation

 Professional abstracting is done for a special market. Some abstracts are written for a general audience.

3. Abstract quality

Not all abstracting is of high quality. Author abstracts are often low quality. Professional abstracts are usually better.

4. Nature of the original document

 Abstracts can be in a different language to the original. As an example, the original document is in English, and the abstract is in Vietnamese.