Hello,

In doing searches in databases such as OmniFile (Wilson), OneFile (Gale /
Cengage), Business Source Premier (EBSCO), Research Library (ProQuest) you
will often find abstracts preceding the main body of the article.

At least in the case of ProQuest some of these abstracts / summaries are not
author supplied but merely a snippet of the first paragraph or some portion of
it and not very telling as to what the actual article is about.

I am curious to know if there is a listing out there somewhere, print or
online, which indicates whether publications come with author supplied
abstracts?

The reason I am asking is that in trying to determine which articles might be
of interest it would be easier to review a set of abstracts than having to
read the entire set of articles. Computer generated summaries really do not
work very for this purpose although I imagine most authors will try to
emphasize their main ideas in the lead paragraph.

Thank you everyone for this help, Steve.