Thursday 9 September 2010

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered

You will never know, because I don’t, just how many abstracts I read in a week, a month or a year!

I do know that I read approximately 600 journals over the course of a year, some of which are three a year and some which are fortnightly! I've never done the more complex arithmetic!

Whenever I read one of these however-many abstracts I put it very quickly into one of four categories:
a) it’s very interesting and I need to share it with you
b) it’s interesting but probably not a general scale – I’ll mark to my personal study
c) this is boooring – and if I’m bored by it I expect that you will be too (an assumption I have to work to or I’d be forever trying to second guess what the readers actually like)
That leaves d)
an abstract which possibly introduces an interesting article but is somehow not clear.

I’m certainly bewildered at the last three journals I’ve read in the British Library today – requested because I thought “this is a d)” – I have absolutely no idea what I saw in any one of them on first reading!

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