Today, of course, it is economically feasible to store vast quantities of text in computer-searchable form. Nevertheless, this has not made abstracts redundant. They remain useful summaries to be read by humans. Furthermore, if recall and precision are both taken into account, they may still be optimum for retrieval purposes because the searching of full text will frequently cause an unacceptable level of irrelevancy
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On the surface, one might assume that knowledge discovery operations would be most likely to succeed when the complete text of items is processed. This is not necessarily so because full text can generate so many spurious relationships that significant and useful associations will be virtually impossible to recognize.
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Text surrogates for larger bodies of text, whether one refers to them as “abstracts,” “summaries,” or some other term, have proved extremely useful in a wide variety of information processing applications for very many years. The increasing application of computers to text processing has not reduced their value (although criteria for judging their quality may have changed somewhat), and one has no reason to suppose that their value diminishes as more critical or sophisticated operations, including those of knowledge discovery, are applied to the text.
Maria, P.; Lancaster, F.W. Abstracts and abstracting a knowledge discovery. Library Trends. 1999;48(1):234.
