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Five leading abstracts services in the field of documentation were inspected. A measure of their coverage was obtained by matching the items of a bibliography against each service. All abstracts published by these services in 1964 were counted and ranked to estimate the scope of each service, to identify key journals and to assess the language problem. Leading journals were also identified by counts of citations following articles in nine leading documentation journals, mostly over a five‐year period. These citations were ranked in the same way as the abstracts in order to further identify key journals and to provide another view of the language barrier.

The citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing styles of abstracts in papers and capture the characteristics of highly cited papers' abstracts.

This research selected 10,000 highly cited papers and 10,000 zero-cited papers from the WOS (2008-2017) database. The Coh-Metrix 3.0 textual cohesion analysis tool was used to quantify the 108 language features of highly cited and zero-cited paper abstracts. The differences of the indicators with significant differences were analyzed from four aspects: vocabulary, sentence, syntax and readability.

The abstracts of highly cited papers contain more complex and professional words, more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and personal pronouns, but fewer nouns and verbs. The sentences in the abstracts of highly cited papers are more complex and the sentence length is relatively longer. The syntactic structure in abstracts of highly cited papers is relatively more complex and syntactic similarities between sentences are fewer. Highly cited papers' abstracts are less readable than zero-cited papers' abstracts.

This study analyses the differences between the abstracts of highly cited and those of zero-cited papers, reveals the common external and deep semantic features of highly cited papers in abstract writing styles, provide suggestions for researchers on abstract writing. These findings can help increase the scientific impact of articles and improve the review efficiency as well as the researchers' abstract writing skills.

The First International Congress on Documentation of Applied Chemistry‐was held at the Institut Français, London, S.W. 7 on 22–25 November 1955. It was organized by the Society of Chemical Industry at the request of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Some 300 persons attended, of whom about 100 were from overseas; these numbers included chemists and documentalists.

Abstracts from seven Internet subject trees (Euroferret, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos Top 5%, Magellan, WebCrawler, Yahoo!), five Internet subject gateways (ADAM, EEVL, NetFirst, OMNI, SOSIG), and three online databases (ERIC, ISI, LISA) were examined for their subject content, treatment of various enriching features, physical properties such as overall length, and their readability. Considerable differences were measured, and consistent similarities among abstracts from each type of source were demonstrated. Internet subject tree abstracts were generally the shortest, and online database abstracts the longest. Subject tree and online database abstracts were the most informative, but the level of coverage of document features such as tables, bibliographies, and geographical constraints was disappointingly poor. On balance, the Internet gateways appeared to be providing the most satisfactory abstracts. The authors discuss the continuing rle in networked information retrieval of abstracts and their functional analogues such as metadata.

The value of the reports of scientific conferences, congresses, and symposia, published as separate volumes, has been questioned on several grounds. It has been alleged that the papers are not adequately refereed, that some have been published before, that some do not report original work, and that many are not noted in abstracting journals and are, therefore, not easily traced in retrospective searches.

The technological revolution is affecting the structure, form and content of documents, reducing the effectiveness of traditional abstracts that, to some extent, are inadequate to the new documentary conditions. Aims to show the directions in which abstracting/abstracts can evolve to achieve the necessary adequacy in the new digital environments. Three researching trends are proposed: theoretical, methodological and pragmatic. Theoretically, there are some needs for expanding the document concept, reengineering abstracting and designing interdisciplinary models. Methodologically, the trend is toward the structuring, automating and qualifying of the abstracts. Pragmatically, abstracts networking, combined with alternative and complementary models, open a new and promising horizon. Automating, structuring and qualifying abstracting/abstract offer some short‐term prospects for progress. Concludes that reengineering, networking and visualising would be middle‐term fruitful areas of research toward the full adequacy of abstracting in the new electronic age.

This study tested the hypothesis that the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on concrete phenomena will, on the average, have fewer synonyms per concept than will the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on abstract phenomena. Subject terms from each of two concrete disciplines and two abstract disciplines were analysed. Results showed that there was a significant difference at the ·05 level between concrete and abstract disciplines but that the significant difference was attributable to only one of the abstract disciplines. The other abstract discipline was not significantly different from the two concrete disciplines. It was concluded that although there is some support for the hypothesis, at least one other factor has a stronger influence on terminological consistency than the phonomena with which a subject deals.

This article aggregates and reviews the disparate information needed to assess journal literature related to communication disorders both directly and peripherally. An extensive analysis was performed using a list of 40 journals on communication disorders derived from a review of selected libraries’ journal collections, and then compared to entries in respected indexes and bibliographies covering this discipline. The result of this analysis is a list providing comprehensive information including scope and coverage, publisher information, indexing/abstracting data, and online availability for those 40 journals. In addition, a survey was conducted among communication disorders faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY) to investigate which professional journals are used regularly for current awareness and for clinical/research information. The information presented in this article should be of interest to faculty, students and practitioners in this area, as well as subject librarians responsible for collection development.

During 1968 Aslib and the Library Association agreed to collaborate in the production of a new abstracts service, starting in 1969, to cover their combined areas of interest. Two issues of Library and Information Science Abstracts have now appeared and though this brief note of progress may appear somewhat premature it is the intention of the LISA editor and his Advisory Committee to maintain a critical watch on the performance of LISA. Such an attitude is a proper continuation of two reports which examined abstracting services in documentation and library science, and Library Science Abstracts in particular, and which laid the foundation for LISA. A full account of the events leading to the publication of LISA, including attempts to collaborate with Referativnyi Zhurnal and Documentation Abstracts (renamed Information Science Abstracts in the March 1969 issue), appeared earlier this year. The initial intention behind the analysis of only two issues of LISA was to provide a comparison with various figures of throughput predicted during planning. A good correspondence was found; for example, the predicted total for 1969 of 2,489 abstracts is only slightly higher than the figure of 2,379 extrapolated from the first two issues. However, users of the service will be interested in actual performance rather than predictions.

In a previous paper (J. Doc. 20 (4) 1964, 212–35) a series of tests on the coverage, overlap, and indexing of abstracts journals were described. Briefly, these were carried out by selecting recent, comprehensive bibliographies on specific subjects, searching the appropriate abstracts journals via the author indexes to determine the number of references given in the bibliography that were abstracted, then consulting the subject indexes to try to locate those references which are known to have been abstracted. A further eight bibliographies have been studied, and the results are reported here.