A pet academic peeve
Having just about finished a literature review for a report on ICT and disadvantage (I’ll provide a link when it becomes available) can I plead with other authors to be specific in their abstracts? Here’s a (suitably anonymised) example of how not to do it…
“… The study investigates the links between [X, Y, and Z] and reveals the changing situation experienced by [people].”
OK so what was the nature of the links?! How has the situation changed? I know an abstract is necessarily of limited length and it can be hard to summarise months of research in a few sentences but abstracts are is meant to enable the reader to quickly get a sense of whether the paper or report itself will be of use. With abstracts like these the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing or discard it.
PS To make matters worse the report in question was divided into sections but the version I downloaded didn’t come with a table of contents or endnotes!