This is an attractive, well laid‐out volume with a clear typeface and plenty of white space. It is aimed at three audiences: library and information science professionals who may include professional abstractors, academics who have to prepare author abstracts of their own papers, and those involved with English for Special Purposes. The author states that it is not necessarily a book to be read from cover to cover, with different sections relevant to different audiences.
This may explain why the overall impression of the book is that it tells you what it is going to say, says it, and then tells you what it has said, and there is an element of redundancy in this, given many of the concepts involved are not particularly taxing. Lines such as “we have already said several times before that abstracts are secondary texts” (p.24) could irritate, but the reader who has grasped the message quickly can just move on, and for those completely new to the subject, there is plenty of reinforcement. On a lighter note, the book is to be recommended for passing on De Guire's application of the bikini principle to abstracts: “they have to be large enough to cover all the important information, but small enough to be interesting to the reader” (p36).
After an introduction and some detailed definitions, Koltay moves on to the characteristics of abstracts. He sets out the difference between informative and indicative abstracts and distinguishes between third party and author abstracts. He notes a move towards the latter, a process which occurred for example, in Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) in 2007. (I must declare an interest here as I worked as a freelance professional abstractor of Japanese journals for LISA for 20 years until this change in policy was introduced). Koltay quotes numerous studies which show flaws in author abstracts, especially in objectivity and balance of information, with particular difficulties when authors have to prepare abstracts in a foreign language. A fundamental issue is that authors may lack awareness of how the abstract may be used, i.e. as a proxy for the original article, and probably without access to it. He touches on the subject of structured abstracts, which have been widely advocated but less widely adopted, probably because they can be deemed to occupy too much space by publishers. A further chapter covers the main skills required by abstractors: comprehension of the text they are summarising and linguistic skills in writing concise, clear prose.
For the majority of readers, the most accessible and relevant sections of the book will be Chapters 5 and 6, which cover “the practice of abstracting”. In particular, the “15 point formulary” (pp.114‐7) is a very useful and clear summary of the process. The only element that I question is the assumption that abstractors will decide whether or not to prepare an abstract. In some cases, the professional abstractor may be expected to create abstracts of all articles of a particular type in the journals which they cover, with the editor of the abstract journal/database making the decision on whether to include the abstract in the final publication.
In the section on vocabulary choice, Koltay makes an often over‐looked point in recommending the use of repetition in phrases such as “middle class and working class” rather than “middle and working class”, so that electronic searches will pick up the “middle class” element without requiring complicated adjacency operators. Normally, the abstractor is looking for concision in vocabulary choice, but at times this can be counter‐productive.
Chapter 6 gives two very detailed examples of preparing abstracts from genuine papers. For each, the full original text is given, a draft abstract is created followed by a refined final abstract, with the reasoning behind the process documented. Chapter 7, “Beyond language and style”, is described in the introduction (p17) as “everything we could not say in the previous chapters which is, nonetheless, of interest.” In particular, it covers aspects of communication theory and expands on the concept of “genre” as used in the book's subtitle. A variety of definitions are set out, the most comprehensible being, “a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purpose”, which gives a flavour of the discussion.
The book is very fully referenced with an extensive and up‐to‐date bibliography. The index is clear, and has been created “only covering concepts that cannot easily be identified from the table of contents” (p17), so there is, for example, no entry for “author abstracts” as this phrase appears in the contents table.
This is a very comprehensive survey of abstracts and abstracting starting from first principles and covering various theoretical approaches, but for those who simply wish to learn how to prepare an abstract, the two practical chapters will be of most value. The remainder will have a more limited audience of those who are interested in the place of the “genre” of abstracts in broader communication and linguistic theory.
