Abstracts

A brief word about abstracts. Articles often have a summary of their contents on the same page where the rest of the metadata is shown. This is called an abstract and it is an important tool for deciding whether an article is worth reading.

Abstracts are written by someone other than the article's author. There are companies that provide this service so the finished product tends to be objective and concise. 99% of the time the abstract is going to be the first piece of information you see. Since it contains the important points from the article, reading it will tell you if this is something you can use.

There are different types of abstracts that summarize in different ways and to a different depth. Most articles just have a brief synopsis of the contents but if the article is reporting the findings of a trial or study then you will get the background, aims, methods, results, and conclusions that they found. Let's take a look at a couple abstracts.

This is an abstract of a study article on PubMed.

This is a brief abstract on PubMed.

Look at the difference between these two. The first gives the essential information about the study that was done, including the methods used. The second gives an outline of what the article is talking about.

Rather than searching the entire text of an article for a word or phrase you can often choose to search only the abstract or title/abstract for your keywords.  Let's say you're looking for an article about the importance of influenza vaccinations. You search for the phrase "influenza vaccinations" and get 50 articles. You look through them and find out that 25 of these articles are about something else entirely and only mention your phrase in passing. The articles that are about influenza vaccinations probably have that phrase in their abstract since it's an important part of the content. That's why you want to look for it there rather than in the text.
So you re-do your search to find the phrase in the abstract and you get 25 results. You can read the abstracts before you look through the entire article to decide which one best fits what you need.

That's not to say you should never do a keyword search in the text. An article may not be about your topic but it might have an important chunk of information about what you need. Also you can combine searching for a keyword in the text with searching for a phrase in the abstract to get even better results. Not all articles have abstracts either.

Reading abstracts is also a good way to learn how to summarize. That's basically what an abstract is anyway; a summary of the article's contents. Read the abstract, read the article, and then read the abstract again to get an idea about how the person who wrote the abstract summarized the article's contents.