Autor: CHAN, Soon Keng; FOO, Schubert
Título: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Qualities of Abstracts for Information Retrieval.
“Eso permite a los escritores iniciados producir resúmenes para publicaciones o conferencias. Los resúmenes son un elemento importante para la recuperación de información. Es necesario que ambas disciplinas colaboren en investigaciones futuras”.
P. Clave
Resumen; calidad; recuperación de la información
“During the 60s and 70s, advanced technologies in information transfer methods have enabled a proliferation of information on the electronic information systems (Lorenz1969). Users were faced with problems of having to filter out constant streams of information inundating their systems, and the abstract, which is a 'mini' version of the full document, became a useful surrogate tool for quick and effective information retrieval. The 80s (Hills 1983) and 90s were landmarks that saw further technological advancements in high-speed computerization and later the Internet facilitated even more widespread and expedient information retrieval. Although information in full texts can now be efficiently retrieved and free text searching is possible, information experts like Pinto and Lancaster (1999) confirmed that abstracts are still useful and explained how full texts often contain details that cloud efficient identification of significant and precise information. Chowdhury, (1999) and Fidel (1986) added that availability of full-text and multimedia information in digital forms has increased the importance of the abstract in scholarly publications.
Consequently, information science writers paid great attention to producing guides to effective abstracting. They include writers who are experts on indexing and abstracting (Collision 1971; Borko and Bernier 1975; Rowley 1982; Cleveland and Cle veland 1983; and Lancaster 1991). Together they summed up the characteristics of a good abstract as one that has brevity, accuracy and clarity, but the over riding criterion of an abstract is whether it serves the needs of the users.
Other information professionals followed up with institutionalized standards, the most significant being American National Standard Institute commonly called ANSI Z39.14-1979, and International Standards ISO 214:1976. Such prolific literature on prescriptions for abstract writing belies the great concern of information professionals or experts in evaluating the quality of abstracts and on regulating the production of this surrogate.
A number of studies were conducted to assess readability using readability formulas, comprehension measures, or both. Dronberger and Kowitz (1975) suggested that the measurement of readability could provide an assessment of one phase of an information system. They explored abstracts published in Research in Education (RIE), and whose full documents were stored in Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). Results showed that the reading level of abstracts was significantly higher than the reading level of source documents because of its concise nature and condensed information. However, it also showed that readability measurement does provide a useful technique for evaluating abstracts. Tenopir and Jacso (1993) measured the quality of abstracts based on style and readability, the extent to which the ANSI standard is observed, and exhaustivity of the abstract. They found that passive voice, prepositions, too many sentences per paragraph, too many words per sentence, and too many syllables per word all lowered readability. However, exhaustivity or extent of content coverage of source documents could not be so easily tested because of individual user needs.
In more recent studies, information professionals (Wheatley and Armstrong 1997) have conducted several major studies on abstract production for online services, a direction to which the ESP researcher may need to shift. Finally, Pinto and Lancaster (1999) based their study on judging the quality of authored abstracts in terms of exhaustivity, accuracy, readability, cohesion, brevity, and cost. They found that although the computer has enabled easy availability of full texts in electronic forms this has not reduced the value of human produced abstracts”.
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