Journal articles, abstract organization

This chapter focuses on writing a conference abstract, not to be confused with a journal article abstract, which was addressed in chapter 7. A conference abstract is submitted in response to a Call for Abstracts issued by conference organizers, typically 3-6 months before the conference takes place. The abstract is reviewed and, if accepted, allows the authors to present a contributed paper (as either an oral or poster presentation) at a conference session. Only accepted papers may be presented at a conference whether they are oral or poster presentations is a decision usually made by conference organizers. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following ... 

Journal articles and patents contain virtually all of the original work in organic chemistry. However, if this were all, if there were no indexes, abstracts, review articles, and other secondary sources, the literature would be unusable because it is so vast that no one could hope to find anything in particular. Fortunately, the secondary sources are excellent. There are various kinds and the categories tend to merge. Our classification is somewhat arbitrary. 

The major purpose of the title is to inform readers about the specific content of the work, ideally identifying both what was studied and how it was studied. The major purpose of an abstract is to summarize, in one clear and concise paragraph, the purpose, experimental approach, principal results, and major conclusions of the work. In most journals, the abstract includes only text in some journals (e.g.. The Journal of Organic Chemistry and Organic Letters), the abstract also includes a graphic. Importantly, both the abstract and title must be able to stand on their own. This is because these two sections (and only these two sections) are reprinted by abstracting services (e.g.. Chemical Abstracts Service, or CAS) in separate documents for literature searches. Also, many chemists read titles and abstracts to obtain a quick overview of the journal s contents but do not read the articles in full. 

In this section, we read and analyze abstracts taken from chemistry journal articles. (Later in the chapter, we focus on titles.) We include passages from abstracts (P1-P17) and entire abstracts (excerpts 7B-7H) to illustrate both individual moves and how abstract moves work together as a whole. In part 1, we examine selections move by move. Because abstracts in organic chemistry journals vary slightly from other chemistry journals, we consider them separately at the end of part 1. In part 2, we examine writing practices that span the entire abstract. 

Reminder Journal articles and proceedings chapters are usually organized with an abstract, introduction, experimental details or theoretical basis, results,discussion,and conclusions. 

In other parts of the world, reference journals were also founded In 1927, the first issue of the journal Nippon Kagaku Soran was published in Japanese. This journal has abstracted the Imown chemical literature in Japan since 1877. The Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (JICST), which was founded 1957, took over the reference journal in 1958 for financial reasons and continued publishing it with the new title Domestic Chemistry Series of JICST Current Awareness. The rest of the world did not take very much notice of Japanese publications, now and then an article was cited in Chemisches Zen-tralblatt or Chemical Abstracts although this Japanese reference journal was essential for Japanese chemists. The number of publications, which were cited in Chemical Abstracts increased steadily (34 abstracts in 1907 109,800 in 1991), the systematic access to the Japanese chemical literature was organized after the Second World War Since 1977, the Japan Association for International Chemical Information (JAICI), a department of JICST, has cooperated with Chemical Abstracts Service and since 1980, all CA abstracts of Japanese publications have been written by JAICI. 

How many of the virtually limitless number of organic compounds are known The organization Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has the task of reviewing every article in every chemical journal that is published and tabulating all of the compounds that have been characterized and reported in these articles. Most of these compounds are organic. The CAS registry listed more than 22 million compounds as of 2003. 

FIS. Synthesis. Thieme, Stuttgart Academic Press, New York, 1969 ff, an international journal of methods in synthetic organic chemistry published monthly. Contains review articles, short communications, and a cumulative index of numbered abstracts of new synthetic methods. 

An efficient approach to this problem is to separate the house organs worthy of consideration into those equivalent to journals and those equivalent to trade publications in terms of content. The house organs considered equivalent to journals then should be given the necessary time and attention. They should be included with the journals in evaluation of articles for the internal literature abstracting service and for the file of articles of importance to a company s products, processes, and fields of interest. Retention schedules must be established in much the same manner as for journals. A few house organs will be bound. The important articles in those not bound should, of course, be clipped and retained in some accessible form. House organs adjudged to be equivalent to trade publications should be so treated. 

It may also be possible to establish or confirm which authors are chemists by consulting Chemical Abstracts. Some chemists also publish in journals devoted exclusively to organic chemistry (as opposed to medicinal chemistry). A search of the Author Indices of Chemical Abstracts discloses articles written in both kinds of journals common authorship marks the chemists and excludes the biologists who do not publish in chemistry journals. 

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