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Abstract
s are useful in at least nine ways: - Papers in science and technology are published in more than 50 languages. Most users of technical publications can read only a few languages, and abstracts in one language help them to select documents for translation. The user needs, at most, two languages; at best, he needs only one language.
- The technical literature is too large for an individual to acquire or scan. There are estimated to be 35,000 or more technical periodicals. More than 200,000 papers are published per year, with some overlap, in each of the fields of chemistry, biology, and biomedicine. Abstracts facilitate the selection of papers to be read.
- Informative abstracts substitute for the original literature in many cases.
- The reading or scanning of abstracts for selection of data or for deciding to read the original articles saves time over that required for selection from original documents.
- Abstracts are more convenient to arrange into related groups than is the original literature. Adjacent technical papers bound in journals may often be unrelated. The same abstract can be placed in several categories less expensively than can originals. Many articles and reports fall into several classes of useful classification systems. Classified abstracts in a published journal bring together guides into a large field of knowledge—one several to many times larger than the user can read.
- Retrospective searches are greatly aided by classified, indexed abstracts. Searching through reports or journals for any large field of knowledge is now impractical.
- By the use of abstracts, accuracy of selection of literature to be read or translated is increased over that of selection from titles or titles plus annotations. The additional information in the abstract increases the accuracy.
- Abstracts facilitate indexing in two ways: 1) The abstract concentrates the indexable subjects so that indexing proceeds at two to four times the rate required for original documents. 2) Elimination of the language problem enables assignment of abstracts for indexing by subject only. This specialization improves both the quality and the rate of indexing, because the subject specialist is not also required to read another language.
- The preparation of articles, bibliographies, reviews, and talks requires organization of the material used; so do acquisition and searching. Abstracts can be used to facilitate this organization. For this purpose they can be copied, cut, and pasted. Organized abstracts also facilitate the indexing of bibliographies and reviews.
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Keywords:
Abstracts;
Abstracting
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