The functions of abstracts in the initial screening of technical documents by the user

Thompson, Charles W. N.

doi:10.1002/asi.4630240407

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…Many studies ask individuals to evaluate the relevance of an item based on a predetermined scale or a user‐determined scale. These scales vary considerably as can be seen in the following examples: three‐point scale (Janes, 199lb; Marcus, Kugel, & Benenfeld, 1978; Saracevic, 1969), five‐point scale (Thompson, 1973), six‐point scale (Smithson, 1994), nine‐point scale (Cuadra & Katter, 1967), 11‐point scale (Rees & Schultz, 1967), and magnitude estimation (Bruce, 1994; Eisenberg, 1986, 1988).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

User perspectives on relevance criteria: A comparison among relevant, partially relevant, and not‐relevant judgments

Maglaughlin

Sonnenwald

2002

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

100

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This study investigates the use of criteria to assess relevant, partially relevant, and not-relevant documents. Study participants identified passages within 20 document representations that they used to make relevance judgments; judged each document representation as a whole to be relevant, partially relevant, or not relevant to their information need; and explained their decisions in an interview. Analysis revealed 29 criteria, discussed positively and negatively, that were used by the participants when selecting passages that contributed or detracted from a document's relevance. These criteria can be grouped into six categories: abstract (e.g., citability, informativeness), author (e.g., novelty, discipline, affiliation, perceived status), content (e.g., accuracy/validity, background, novelty, contrast, depth/scope, domain, citations, links, relevant to other interests, rarity, subject matter, thought catalyst), full text (e.g., audience, novelty, type, possible content, utility), journal/publisher (e.g., novelty, main focus, perceived quality), and personal (e.g., competition, time requirements). Results further indicate that multiple criteria are used when making relevant, partially relevant, and not-relevant judgments, and that most criteria can have either a positive or negative contribution to the relevance of a document. The criteria most frequently mentioned by study participants were content, followed by criteria characterizing the full text document. These findings may have implications for relevance feedback in information retrieval systems, suggesting that systems accept and utilize multiple positive and negative relevance criteria from users. Systems designers may want to focus on supporting content criteria followed by full text criteria as these may provide the greatest cost benefit.

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Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

User perspectives on relevance criteria: A comparison among relevant, partially relevant, and not‐relevant judgments

Maglaughlin

Sonnenwald

2002

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

100

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“…Catalog indicativity, and closely related issues, have been studied by a number of investigators [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] . Superficially, (2) The article isonly indirectly relevant to my research (1 0 ) The article is theoreficul, rather than experimental.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To compare this with our own study one would have had to ask the users directly whether they desired the abstracts and not just count unsolicited complaints. The Thompson study [18] is another one in which a current-awareness type function rather than retrospective search is being reviewed. He concluded that "the addition of a separate identifiable abstract" does not increase the ability of a user to make relevance judgments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Catalog information and text as indicators of relevance

Marcus

Kugel

Benenfeld

1978

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

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The indicativity of a type of catalog information (or catalog field) is intended as a measure of how well the information in the field conveys the contents of the document it represents. In the experiments reported here, indicativity is measured for several catalog fields by comparing users' evaluations of the relevance of documents on the basis of the information in a given field with their judgments on the basis of full text. A small but statistically significant increase in indicativity is found as the length of a catalog field (as measured by the number of different content‐word stems) is increased. The title field is found to have an indicativity of 0.64; matching subjects, 0.67; subjects, 0.70; abstract, 0.73. Despite the relatively small gain in indicativity for the longer fields, users value the longer fields highly for determining relevance if one judges by the amount of time they spend on them. Support for the hypothesis that the indicativity measure does not fully reflect the value of the fields is developed. Thus, the question of the cost effectiveness of the longer fields is unresolved. Other aspects of catalog field utility studied under the Project Intrex equipments are also reported.

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“…It could be argued that, by providing some context to the study, abstracts allow experienced readers to utilize the remaining part of the text more effectively [5], but there has long been consensus that the main function of an abstract is to be found in literature searches [6,7]. These two sections-abstracts and summaries-are therefore to be interpreted within the specific context of the use of scientific literature in the historical period when they were developed [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Narrativity in Abstracts of the Biomedical Literature between 1989 and 2022

et al. 2023

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Previous analysis has shown that the use of narrative devices in the biomedical literature has changed over time. The purpose of the present study was to measure the degree of narrativity in corpora of scientific abstracts obtained from Pubmed through the use of a proprietary software LIWC 2022, which, based on pre-set dictionaries, attributes scores for Staging, Plot Progression and Cognitive Tension to texts. Each text is automatically divided into a number of segments, so that the score change can be assessed throughout the different parts of a text, thus identifying its narrative arc. We systematically applied the scoring system to a corpus of 680,000 abstracts from manuscripts of any kind and genre published in the years 1989–2022 and indexed in MEDLINE, an independent corpus of 680,000 abstracts of Primary studies published in the same years, and finally a corpus of 680,000 abstracts of Review papers that appeared in the 1989–2022 interval. We were able to create plots of the pattern of how these three scores changed over time in each corpus and observed that the prototypical pattern observed in narrative texts, e.g., novels, is not seen in abstracts of the scientific literature, which, however, mostly possess a diverse but quite reproducible pattern. Overall, Reviews better conform to a higher degree of narrativity than Primary studies.

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The functions of abstracts in the initial screening of technical documents by the user

Cited by 7 publications

References 42 publications

User perspectives on relevance criteria: A comparison among relevant, partially relevant, and not‐relevant judgments

User perspectives on relevance criteria: A comparison among relevant, partially relevant, and not‐relevant judgments

Catalog information and text as indicators of relevance

The Evolution of Narrativity in Abstracts of the Biomedical Literature between 1989 and 2022

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