Abstracts are crap?

[Morgan]

Hello again,

I accidentally settled upon the Stephen Colbert show one evening
when he was actually interviewing someone of interest.
It was an author who is a PhD who had just written a book in defense of using ones hands.

About half way through the interview he started to speak about a job he had condensing SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS into summaries or ABSTRACTS.

He goes on to say that he was obliged to keep a quota of at least twenty eight of these per day. Then he goes on to say that what he did was "CRAP."

Here is the youtube interview...he says this about half-way through.

YouTube - Matthew B Crawford philosopher

Here is a "New York Times" article reemphasizing the same point. Makes you take pause and think about what we and what we are reading is actually CRAP. I know that physicans and the ENTIRE medical community reads these things as well when coming to their own conclusions. hmmmm

___________________________


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/ma...pagewanted=all

"A Case For Working With Your Hands" New York Times; Matthew B. Crawford.
May 21, 2009

Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality, as I learned some time ago. After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Excerpt:
You might wonder: Wasn’t there any quality control? My supervisor would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was sometimes corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article at hand. Rather, my supervisor and I both were held to a metric that was conjured by someone remote from the work process — an absentee decision maker armed with a (putatively) profit-maximizing calculus, one that took no account of the intrinsic nature of the job. I wonder whether the resulting perversity really made for maximum profits in the long term. Corporate managers are not, after all, the owners of the businesses they run.
_________________________

All for now,

Morgan

[Sadsack]

Morgan -

I saw that interview, and the point is well taken.

However, abstracts are "teasers", and when a person reviews an abstract and the topic is of interest, they go to the body of the article.

I went to a very research-oriented university and we had to produce a minimum of two original research pieces. We also had to read a great deal of original research articles. I then went on to become a research assistant at UMASS Medical School.

What the interviewee failed to mention is that many scientists write their own abstracts for these articles.

SS

[tcmgpt13]

I believe he did make a passing remark about how some of the articles did have abstracts written by the original scientist(s) who did the study:

"In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained."

[Sadsack]

TCM -
Thanks for adding that...I missed it. I am sure each journal has their own policies regarding abstracts, so it would depend on which journal he worked for.
SS

[Morgan]

I'm happy to know that there is quality work being churned out but...

Therein lies the problem.
How can one discern what standard what
one is reading is being held to?


Morgan

[Sadsack]

I guess you have to read the body of the article. If it is something of interest, such as a Morgellons article, I would think you'd want to do that anyway.

SS