A code of good practice among scientific journals is needed to facilitate the exchange of information between scientists in all countries, especially because of the increase in the volume of scientific publications.
This abstract should be drawn up in accordance with the recommendations of the "Guide for the Preparation of Authors' Abstracts for Publication".
Titles of articles should be sufficiently descriptive and informative concerning their contents to be of practical use in title lists, in indexing and in coding for information storage and retrieval; abbreviations and specialist jargon should be avoided.
A text is regarded as belonging to the category "original scientific paper" when it constitutes a significant extension of knowledge or understanding and it is written in such a way that a qualified research worker is able, on the basis of the information given, (i) to reproduce the experiment and secure the results described with equal accuracy or within the limits of experimental error specified by the author, or (ii) to repeat the author's observations calculations or theoretical derivations and judge his findings.
A text is regarded as a "provisional communication or preliminary note" when it contains one or more novel items of scientific information, but is insufficiently detailed to allow readers to check the said information in the ways described above. Another type of short note, generally in letter form, gives brief comments on work already published.
A subject review article is a survey of one particular subject, in which information already published is assembled, analysed and discussed. The scope of the article will depend on the journal for which it is intended.It is the duty of the authors of a review article to endeavour to give credit to all published work which has advanced the subject, or which would have advanced it, had it not been overlooked.
If a historical or critical review of existing knowledge is included in a research paper, it should be confined to the immediate subject of the paper. More comprehensive reviews should be published separately as such.
Study of the format and style of similar papers on related topics in the journal to which a paper is to be sumitted may be a valuable guide to proper form and content.Bibliographical references should be complete. They should be presented in the style required by the journal, e.g., initials of authors, page numbers, publishers and town for book references, etc. They should specify all authors (not just the first one et al.) unless the number of authors is excessive.
Etymologically unsound nomenclature, ambiguities, technical jargon and colloquial language should be avioded.
Authors should not use excessive non-standard abbreviations, especially of infrequently used words, since this makes papers very hard to read. Authors should check the final draft of their manucript very carefully to eliminate typographical errors, omissions of symbols and grammatical errors.Careless preparation of manuscripts wastes time of editors, reviewers and (if published) readers, and tends to create bias against the scientific validity of the work being reported.
Authors who write papers in a language in which they are not completely fluent should make every effort, by consultation with colleagues who are fluent in the language, to present the work in acceptable form. It is unfair to expect either editors or referees to undertake the task of rewriting the paper to correct inadequacies of language.
Reference should be brought up to date to the time of submission of the manuscript. This is especially important in the case of papers submitted for publication a long time after completion of the work reported.Work discussed in the text may be referred to by naming all authors, by specifying the first author et al. or by referring to the institution of group if the work of a groupe is involved. Work should not be identified by specifying the country of origin.
There is no question of prohibiting allusions to conversations or private communication, but it is certainly not justified to make a statement or advance a theory based solely on a mere conversation which has not been checked.
The following notes set out the main points to be considered by authors in preparing such titles and abstracts.
In writing abstracts authors should bear in mind that these may be the only parts of the papers that are read.
The purpose of an abstract is threefold:
(i) to help workers in the subject of the article to decide whether the contents of the paper are such that they desire to read it in full;
(ii) to give readers for whom the paper is of "fringe" interest as much information as possible, so that it is unnecessary for them to read the whole paper;
(iii) to expedite the work of the abstracting journals by making it possible for them to reproduce immediately the author's abstract; this will be of great assistance in the general improvement of information services in the scientific field.
When feasible, it is preferable to give specific numerical results rather than merely to say what was measured.
Otherwise valuable information may be hidden.
Care should be taken to avoid distortions and misinformation. Statements of conclusions and inferences should be accompanied by an indication of their range of validity.Comparison with earlier results (when this is of major importance to the paper) should be as specific as possible.
In order that the abstract can be taken over unaltered by an abstracting journal, it should not be written in the first person.
The abstract should not contain non-standard abbreviations, symbols or terminology unless there is space in the abstract itself to identify them. It should not make specific references (by number) to a section, equation, figure or table of the paper.
If such reference is necessary citations to scientific journals should be made in conformity with the standard practice of the journal for which the paper is written. (The Unesco International Conference on Science Abstracting, 1949, recommended the standard proposed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Technical Committee 46, names of journals being abbreviated as in the World List of Scientific Periodicals.)
It may then, for example, when printed be cut out and mounted on a 7.5cm X 12.5cm card. The International Conference on Science Abstracting commended the practice of certain journals in which all the abstracts appearing in a single issue are printed together either inside the cover or with advertisements on the back in such a way that they can be cut out and mounted on index cards for reference without mutilating the pages of the journal itself. For this purpose the abstract should not be more than about 10cm wide.