Abstracts and Abstracting. A Genre and Set of Skills for the Twenty-First Century

227 Pages·2010·2.151 MB·English

by  Tibor Koltay (Auth.)

Abstracts and Abstracting
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Abstracts and Abstracting
A genre and set of skills for the
twenty-first century
T K
IBOR OLTAY
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First published in 2010
ISBN:
978 1 84334 517 6
© T.Koltay,2010
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About the author
Professor Tibor Koltay is Head of Department and Course
Director for Library and Information Science (LIS) curricula
at the Department of Information and Library Studies,
Faculty of Applied and Professional Arts, Szent István
University, Jászberény, Hungary. He also teaches at the
Department of Library and Information Science at the
University of West Hungary in Szombathely, Hungary.
Professor Koltay graduated from Eötvös Loránd University,
Budapest, Hungary in 1984 with an MA in Russian, and
gained his PhD there in 2002. In 1992 he was awarded the
Certificate of Advanced Studies in Library and Information
Science at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA.
An experienced abstractor having written over 200
abstracts, Professor Koltay has been teaching abstracting
since 1992 and in 2003 published a Hungarian language
monograph on the theory and practice of abstracting.
The author may be contacted via the publishers.
vii
1
Introduction
Abstracts and abstracting have a long history and the issues
involved are still the subject of much comment, debate and
research. Despite their changing role in the digital world,
abstracts remain popular, even in cases where the user has
complete full-text access, because the proper use of abstracts
shields the searcher from unacceptable levels of irrelevance
that result from full-text searching. In the changing
information environment of our century and the era of
Web 2.0, abstracting can be considered a fixed point
characterised by the constancy, persistence and continuity of
its values, yet still subject to development.
Much has been written about abstracts and abstracting.
Although there is a relatively large number of textbooks on
the topic, there is no up-to-date book on abstracting in
English. As well as giving a comprehensive coverage of the
topic, the aim of this book is to present a novel viewpoint,
especially on informative and indicative abstracts. The
discussion is based on an interdisciplinary approach,
blending the methods of library and information science and
linguistics. Thus the book strives to be a synthesis of theory
and practice based on a large existing body of knowledge,
which nonetheless is often characterised by misleading
terminology and flawed beliefs.
This book is about abstracts and abstracting, a genre and a
process that go together with a set of skills. Abstracts and
1
Abstracts and Abstracting
abstracting may be called requisites of the twenty-first century
with good reason. To discuss these issues thoroughly, a
reflection on other, related genres is also necessary and will be
provided.
Who is this book for?
This book is intended for three main groups of readers:
(cid:1)
professional abstractors (usually information professionals);
(cid:1)
researchers, who publish articles in scholarly journals;
(cid:1)
linguists and language teachers.
Information professionals work under different names and
have different duties, but the majority of them learn about
abstracts and abstracting. Many of them also write abstracts
on papers that have appeared in scholarly and professional
journals. (In our subsequent discussions we will use the
words article and paper as synonyms.) From among
librarians, reference librarians (mainly working in academic
and special libraries) will most probably face the challenge of
abstracting (Palais, 1988). There is one important category of
information professionals, called information brokers, who
usually work independently. For them abstracting is also an
important skill and occupation (Rosen, 1988).
Researchers who publish papers in the scholarly journals
of the fields of knowledge in which they work are usually
required to write abstracts of their own papers. These are
called author abstracts. We will define them in Chapter 2 on
definitions and discuss their attributes in a subsection of
Chapter 3.
Abstracting is also of interest to linguists and language
teachers, especially practitioners who specialise in English for
Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes
2
Introduction
(EAP), as well as English as a Second Language (ESL) and
English as a Foreign Language (EFL), who can thus also
make use of this book. Similarly, those who teach technical
writing can find many parts of the book useful. At the end of
this introduction, we will discuss this in more detail.
What is abstracting and what is an
abstract?
Stated very simply, abstracting is the process of producing
abstracts. It is a writing activity that allows information to
be passed on in an economical way (Werlich, 1988).
To make the notion of the abstract clear, let us first take a
simple, practice-oriented definition which states ‘an abstract
is a condensed version of a longer piece of writing that
highlights the major points covered, concisely describes the
content and scope of the writing, and reviews the writing’s
contents in abbreviated form’ (Kilborn, 1998).
Although the word abstract can have different meanings
in different contexts, it is usually assumed that an abstract
will present the main contents of an original document.
There is clearly a burning question: how can we identify this
main or, in other words, most important content? It is the
goal of this book to answer this question and in Chapter 5
we will concentrate in particular on doing so.
The abstract is a condensed document shorter than the
original, the content of which is represented by the abstract.
An abstract is a representation in the sense that it stands for
another text (Cross and Oppenheim, 2006). We will develop
this thought further in Chapter 2 on definitions.
Note: Up to this point we have been using – and will
henceforth continue to use – the words information and
document as near synonyms, even though we know, for
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Abstracts and Abstracting
example, that documents can also be regarded as containers
of information. There are other similar cases which we will
point out as necessary.
Why abstracts and abstracting?
In advertising its courses on abstracting, the Association for
Information Management (Aslib, a professional organisation
based in the United Kingdom) states the following:
Information overload affects everyone, and there is an
urgent need for people who can extract the key facts
and opinions from documents rapidly and reproduce
them accurately. Abstracting and summarising
techniques are essential for current awareness services,
enquiry answering and desk research, preparing
briefings and writing reports. (Aslib, 2008)
This passage shows that many different types of abstracting
can be found in libraries, information centres and other
institutions concerned with information, as well as in the
field of scientific and scholarly research. (Despite the slight
but perceptible difference between the meaning of the words
scientific and scholarly, we will use them interchangeably.)
There are, obviously, other different incentives to study
abstracting and acquire abstracting skills. To explain the
different motivations to write abstracts, we need to take a
look at the nature of scholarly literature. Both information
professionals and researchers of different disciplines know
that there has been and still is an enormous growth in
scholarly literature. This growth is especially notable in the
(hard, natural) sciences, where researchers use scholarly
journals both for publishing and gaining knowledge. The
4
Introduction
vast quantities of literature generally and of journal papers
in particular make it extremely difficult to survey, find and
use relevant publications. This has resulted in a demand for
representations of documents that are not only condensed
but are accurate and thorough. These representations –
abstracts – have become the standard tools for accessing
professional and scholarly literature (Pinto and Lancaster,
1999; Cross and Oppenheim, 2006).
As Lancaster (2003) points out, the growth in the quantity
of information caused by the development of the Internet and
especially the widespread use of the World Wide Web has
made the situation even more complicated. If we regard the
Internet as an information source, its main problem is not
merely its size giving access to a tremendous quantity of
information. The major problem is the lack of quality
control. To be exact, there is no quality control that is similar
or comparable to those mechanisms which characterise the
information systems of the print environment. In the print
environment, various institutions perform a quality filtering
function. To begin with, publishers of scholarly books and
journals apply a review procedure. In the case of journal
papers, filtering is done by editors as well as by
representatives of the given field’s wider community. The
latter perform a peer review to ensure that papers correspond
to the norms of the field and are acceptable for the given
scholarly community.
At the next level, indexing and abstracting services
provide a quality filter in terms of the choices they make to
index or abstract from among the published papers.
Indexing services produce indexes of the literature. These
contain not only bibliographic data such as the author, the
title of the article, the name, the publication year, the volume
and issue of the journal and the pages where a given paper
appeared, but there is information about the topics covered
5