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Types of

Abstract
Mercy Daez
DJ Jaromahum

Types of Materials
Abstracted
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o
o
o
o
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journals
technical reports
theses/dissertations
books
patent specifications
conferences and
symposiums proceedings
o reviews

Classification of Abstracts
Since abstracts deal with a branch
of knowledge, they can be
generally classified into three
categories:
Discipline-oriented abstracts
Mission-oriented abstracts
Slanted abstracts

Discipline-oriented abstract
It is one that is written for
abstracting service dealing with a
branch of knowledge.
This abstract aims to serve the
needs of a particular subject or
discipline.

Examples:
o Physics
o Chemistry
o Biology
o Medicine
o Engineering
o Education
o Library Science

Mission-oriented abstracts
It is written for an abstracting
service dealing with the applications
of a branch of knowledge.
It aims to serve the information
needs of a particular industry or
group of individuals.

Example:
o Railway Engineering abstracts

Slanted abstracts
These are often published as inhouse abstracting bulletins.
The audience of this abstracting
service are the employees,
scientists, researchers and other
knowledge workers within the
organization
Example:
o Food Processing abstracts
o Dried Fruits abstracts

True Forms of abstracts


It contain information which are
planned, information which are
objectively treated based on real
findings and information that was
written in complete sentences.
They are not evaluative.
These are:
Informative abstracts
Indicative abstracts
Informative-Indicative abstracts

Informative abstracts
It present qualitative and
quantitative information contained in
a document.
An informative abstract need not be
of any specified length. Normally it
can be 1/10 or 1/20 of the original
length of the document.
Informative abstract is written by an
abstractor who is a subject expert
and well-trained in abstracting.

Indicative abstracts
It only describe briefly what will be
found if you read the original
document.
This abstract does not contain much
data and most often cannot be used
in place of the original.
30 to 50 words can make up an
indicative abstract, thus can be
written quickly and economically by
an abstractor who has less expertise
on the subject.

Indicative abstracts are more


appropriate for review articles,
books, conference proceedings,
reports without conclusions,
essays and bibliographies.

Informative-indicative
abstracts
This is a combination of two
abstracts, parts of the abstracts
are written in informative or
indicative style.
Major aspects of the document are
written in informative way, while
aspects which are of minor
importance are written indicatively.
This mixed style can utilize not too
many words and not too little
words just enough to be able to
transmit information effectively.

Not True forms of abstracts


According to Lancaster (1991) and
Collison (1971) the not true forms
of abstracts are:
Critical abstract
Telegraphic abstract
Modular abstract

________

________

Critical abstract

Critical abstract
It is really a condensed critical
review that when applied to
reports, journal articles, and other
relatively brief items, serve much
the same purpose as a critical
book review.
It is subjective and evaluative, the
abstractor expresses views on the
quality of work of the author and
contrasts it with the work of
others.

???????????

Telegraphic abstract

Telegraphic abstract
It is written in a telegram style and
therefore imprecise.
It is written in incomplete
sentences and really resembles a
telegram.
It contains a string of keywords
which serve as crude indicator of
the subject scope of the document.

This type of abstract is computer


produced based on word counts,
the higher frequency of the
appearance of the words the
words through word counts the
higher the possibility that these
words will be part of a string.

_______ ________

Modular abstract

Modular abstract
It is rare because it is somewhat
customized based on the request
of the customer.
The primary purpose of this form
of abstract is to give the customer
the opportunity to grasped the
content of the document by
showing the four types of abstracts
without attempting to force
standardized abstracts.

Modular abstract seems very


reliable, but very time consuming
and very difficult to prepare.

We cannot deny the fact that abstract


are expensive.it is very costly to
prepare an abstract because it requires
technical skills, writing skills, knowledge
of the subject, and a long period of
time to read the document to be
abstracted. To solve these problems,
Borko (1975),Rowley (1988),
Lancaster(1991) proposed newer and
more compact forms of document
surrogates.

Extracts
Are sentences, data , tables,
equations,
formulae which are lifted
verbatimly
from the original document
surrogate
must posses the ability to
recognize the sentence, data, tables, etc.
that should
be lifted verbatimly to be able
to represent or embody the aboutness of
the document

Abstract
We introduce five methods for summarizing parts of Web pages on
handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), or
cellular
phones. Each Web page is broken into text units that can each
be
hidden, partially displayed, made fully visible, or summarized. The
methods accomplish summarization by different means. One method
extracts significant keywords from the text units, another attempts to f
ind each text unit's most significant sentence to act as a summary for
the unit. We use information retrieval techniques, which we adapt to t
he World-Wide Web context. We tested the relative performance of
our five methods by asking human subjects to accomplish single-page
I
nformation search tasks using each method. We found that the
combination of keywords and single-sentence summaries provides
significant improvements in access times and number of pen actions,
as compared to other schemes.

Keywords: Personal Digital Assistant, PDA, Handheld Computers, Mobile


Computing, Summarization, WAP, Wireless Computing, Ubiquitous
Computing.

Short abstract or mini abstracts


are similar to annotations because they
comprise only one or two sentence.
Statistical or tabular abstracts
are most effective in conveying certain
types of information found in documents
that contain economic, social and marketing
data. Statistical data or tabular data on
economics, social conditions, marketing
trends are presented in their original format
to present the summary of the contents of
the document.

Author abstract
Are prepared by the author who is
undeniably the best versed in his own
specific subject. One of the trends in
journal publishing is the appearance of
abstract below the title of the article.
This show that prospective authors are
required to prepare abstract of his/her
work and to submit it together with the
manuscript. In this case , the abstractor
can use the author abstract as a model
and modify it to fit to the information I
nterest of the costumers.

Homotopic abstracts
are published at the same time as the
original manuscript. Since the
abstractor does not modify the abstract
which accompanied the manuscript, the
abstracts stay as it is. Homotopic
abstracts accompany the manuscripts
so that the articles cannot be published
without the abstract. Since homotopic
abstracts are prepared by authors,
they are considered as author
abstract.

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