Abstracting services and you

It is no secret that we live in a world of information explosion. How do we keep up with recentmost reports in our chosen area of science or technology? Researchers often turn to abstracting services to help them zero-in on the most interesting papers, based on a handful of "descriptors". As people who are involved in the process of knowledge generation, we must be aware of the abstracting services operate. Ultimately, our work too will be classified in to specialized categories. If you understand essentials of abstracting, chances are that you will think very carefully about how to present your work, so that your target audience easily finds your work. 

Knowing essentials of indexing and abstracting is enormously helpful in writing good abstracts and titles for your patents and papers. Most science and engineering students are never taught the basics of abstracting. Kindly spend some time thinking about how indexing services assign "descriptors" to your articles/patents, and how they establish "access points" for your articles. The descriptors (or key words) we use in our abstracts are used by services (eg. Scopus, Inspec, SciFinder etc) to classify and categorize our patents/articles. Hence it is essential that you choose descriptors for your work very carefully. 

Time spent understanding the essentials of abstracting is time well-spent! I hope we develop the skills to make our articles/patents more visible. 

As I sign off here, let me reiterate: crafting out carefully worded abstracts, titles, figure captions, and conclusions is essential to creating impact in a world facing information overload. explosion!