RESOURCE CENTRE MANUAL
HEALTHLINK WORLDWIDE
7.10 Abstracts
Abstracts are summaries of articles, books or reports. They are a useful way for
resource centre staff or users to identify relevant materials. They are also useful
for providing more detailed information about materials held in the collection,
either in current awareness bulletins or on a database.
There are three types of abstract:
• Indicative abstracts are short, simple and objective. They describe the theme
of the article or publication.
• Informative abstracts are longer and more thorough. They describe the
objectives and conclusions of the article or publication, as well as the
contents.
• Evaluative abstracts (also known as critical abstracts) are subjective. They
evaluate the contents of the article or publication.
Abstracts are often included in bibliographies and bibliographic databases.
They are sometimes included in current awareness bulletins. Videos and articles
in periodicals often carry an author’s or publisher’s abstract. The abstracts that
are published with the material can be included in a bibliographic database
record or current awareness bulletin, in order to help users decide how useful
the materials might be for their needs.
Only larger resource centres have the capacity to produce abstracts for all their
materials. Abstracting is time-consuming and requires skills in summarising,
analysing and writing. If the resource centre is considering producing abstracts,
abstracting needs be to compared with allocating keywords (see page Section
5.3: Allocating keywords). Keywords can provide a similar indication of the
content, audience and level of a material, and make it easy to identify relevant
materials, but cannot provide information about the conclusions of an article,
or evaluate its content.
18 SECTION 7: INFORMATION SERVICES