Abstracting Service
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by admin
If you like to read and have a special expertise or affinity for technical subjects, an abstracting business may interest you. The main job of an abstracting service is to read articles from journals and magazines of all kinds and condense them into a brief synopsis of ten to fifteen sentences for computer storage and retrieval. In some cases, the articles are indexed instead of, or in addition to, being abstracted. Indexing means that the abstractor creates a list of key words based on the article or selects terms from a controlled vocabulary list so that a computer can locate an article quickly.
Free-lance abstracting and indexing services may work for any of the 6,000+ database producers (such as Chemical Abstracts Service, Information Access Company, and Dow Jones) that provide on-line information to businesses, researchers, and professionals around the world. Many of these database producers specialize in areas such as law, medicine, engineering, science, and other technical fields.
In addition to such database applications, abstracting and indexing services also may work for corporations, creating summaries of books and articles of interest to the company’s executives, technical people, or clients. Some large corporations make extensive use of abstracting and indexing to stay up-to- date and competitive in today’s world of rapidly changing information.
Knowledge and Skills You Need to Have
• You need to have sufficient knowledge in the subject areas in which you are abstracting or indexing—or a broad-enough general knowledge and interest—to be able to ferret out central ideas and relevant information from printed materials on a wide range of topics. Subject specialists are generally more valuable.
• You must have the ability to synthesize and consolidate information. This requires learning how to read an article or book differently than you normally would. You need to be able to skim through and pick out key points, condense the points into the required number of lines, and pick out key words that someone would use to search for that information.
• You need excellent writing skills and the ability to communicate the material you’re abstracting clearly and concisely.
• You need to have a familiarity with database services, CD-ROM publishers, and other companies that supply or deal with information.
Advantages
• The work can be interesting and intellectually stimulating.
• You learn constantly about a variety of subjects and can keep abreast of significant changes in many fields.
• You may have a great amount of flexibility in choosing your working hours: days, evenings, weekends, etc.
• The kind of writing you do for abstracting—in which you focus and summarize in a clear and concise manner—is valuable for doing other kinds of writing.
• The business is a good add-on business to an editorial service, indexing service, or technical writing service.
Disadvantages
• In some cases, you may have tight deadlines and turnaround times; some articles must be completed within a few days.
• The work is highly detailed and requires intense concentration, precision, and careful organization.
