Hi

I believe that EbscoHost does use author supplied abstracts and indicates
this.  It also allows you to search specifically for an author supplied
abstract in its search strategy on the platform.  You are allowed to choose
AB which is an abstract or an author supplied abstract in the "select a
field" box so that your search term is only searched through the abstracts.
Ebscohost provides the author supplied abstract whenever it is available.

Sandhya (Sandy) D. Srivastava
Electronic Resources Librarian
New York Institute of Technology
Wisser Library
Northern Boulevard
Old Westbury, New York 11568-8000
Telephone: (516) 686 - 3790
Fax: (516) 686 - 1152
Email: ssrivast@nyit.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Steve Rossiter
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 6:18 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Whose abstract?

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.