Abstracts

As kinds of documents are abstracts forms of annotated bibliographies. They are typically current bibliographies, which provide short abstracts of the indexed documents. Synonymous terms are "Briefs", "Précis" and "Zentrallblätter". They are published in different media: Printed publications, on-line databases and CD-ROM databases.

Abstracts come in different genres. A differentiation have been made between informative abstracts, which summarizes the main conclusions of a document and indicative abstracts only providing clues about the content of the paper (see Fedosyuk, 1978). Recently has a further development of the informative abstract become common among many journals: the structured abstract. Journal of Documentation, for example, demands: "Authors must supply a structured abstract set out under 4-6 sub-headings: Purpose; Methodology/Approach; Findings; Research limitations/implications (if applicable); Practical implications (if applicable) and, the Originality/value of paper. Maximum is 250 words in total." (Journal of Documentation, 2005). This new trend may be associated with the trend known as evidence based practice and thus be an indication of an epistemological influence on criteria for manuscript design.

Another differentiation is between evaluative or critical abstracts on the one hand and non-evaluative abstracts on the other hand. Evaluative abstracts assess the methods, claims and results whereas non-evaluative abstracts just summarizes parts of the document.

Today contain many scientific papers an author-produced abstracts. This has not always been the case, and the information profession has contributed to the propagation of this practice. Such author-abstracts are often reproduced without changes in abstract journals. It is a custom that abstracts written by other than the author are signed. Most journals, but not all journals, allow their abstracts to be re-used by abstracting services.

In information science is research made concerning the possibilities for automated production of abstracts, "Text-summarization programs" (a part of "natural language processing" research and of Artificial Intelligence). Another field of research is the relative informative value of different subject access points such as words from titles, abstracts, descriptors, full text or references.

There are almost none investigations of the quality of published abstracts. One criticism of published abstracts is given by Herrell (1979). Tinker (1999) concluded "that although the human-produced abstracts generally performed better than the machine versions, the extent of the difference in performance was not vast, an in the majority of cases the statistical hypothesis that there is no difference between the acceptability of human and machine produced abstracts was sustained, or only rejected at a low-order significance level" (emphasis in original).

"Bibliographic databases offer limited information about resources; however, they only contain a tiny fraction of the total content of a resource, such as a 100-word abstract to a 10-page article or a 100-page report. The problem with this limited information is that it often leaves important content undiscoverable, because abstracts usually focus on community-specific aspects of the research while more global aspects of the research, such as mathematical technique, are barely touched on, if at all. " (Wojick et al., 2006).

Approaches to automatic abstracting

(cf., Marcu, 2003)

Position-based method
Title-based method
Cue-based method
Word-frequency method
Cohesion-based methods (Word-based, lexical-chain based or connectedness-based)
Discourse based method

Borko, H. & Chatman, S. (1963). Criteria for acceptable abstracts: a survey of abstractor´s instructions. American Documentation, 14, 149-160.

Collison, R. L. (1971). Abstracts and Abstracting Services. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio.

Fedosyuk, M. Y. (1978). Linguistic criteria for differentiating informative and indicative abstracts. Automatic Documentation and Mathematical Linguistics, 12(3), 98-110.

Hartley, J. (2003). Improving the clarity of journal abstracts in psychology: the case for structure. Science Communication, 24(3), 366-379.

Herrell, J. M. (1979). Abstract Thinking in APA Journals. American Psychologist, 34, 178-180.

Hert, C. A. & Harris, L. E. (2006). Re-conceptualizing statistical abstracts in the 21st century: An empirical study of Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. Government Information Quarterly, 23(2), 293-308.

Lancaster, F. W. (1991). Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice. London: Library Association.

Manzer, B. M. (1977). The Abstract Journal, 1790-1920. Origin, Development and Diffusion. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press.

Marcu, D. (2003). Automatic abstracting. IN: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. New York: Marcel Dekker. Pp. 245-256.

Montesi , M. & Owen , J. M. (2007). Revision of author abstracts: how it is carried out by LISA editors. Aslib Proceedings, 59(1), 26-45.

Montesi, M. & Urdiciain, B. G. (2005a). Abstracts: problems classified from the user perspective. Journal of Information Science, 31(6), 515-526. Available:

Montesi, M. & Urdiciain, B. G. (2005b). Recent linguistic research into author abstracts: Its value for information science. Knowledge Organization, 32(2). 64-78.

Tinker, A. J. (1999). An empirical evaluation of human-produced and machine-produced abstracts. Library and Information Research News (LIRN), 23(#74), 33-44.

Winker, M. A. (1999). The Need for Concrete Improvement in Abstracts Quality. Journal of the American Medical Association, 281(12), 1129-1130.

Wojick, D. E.; Warnick, W. L.; Carroll, B. C. & Crowe, J. (2006). The Digital Road to Scientific Knowledge Diffusion. A Faster, Better Way to Scientific Progress? Commentary. D-Lib Magazine, 12(6). Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june06/wojick/06wojick.html