A Comparative Analysis of English Abstracts and Summaries of Chinese Research Articles in Three Library and Information Science Journals Indexed by the Taiwan Social Science Citation Index

Abstract

English summary is a unique research genre that emerged in response to foreign scholars’ needs for Taiwanese scholarship. It was developed as a solution to the problems caused by the inadequacy of English abstracts and the difficulties in translating full Chinese journal articles into English. Informative English summaries help Chinese journals to be used and indexed by foreign databases and citation indexes. However, different authors write in different ways. The structure and composition of English summaries remains unknown. To enhance our understanding of what has been presented to foreign readers, this study explored the structural and compositional differences between English abstracts and summaries. Abstracts and summaries of Chinese research articles published in three TSSCI-indexed library and information science journals in 2016 and 2017 were content analyzed. The results indicate English abstracts and summaries shared the same focus on reporting authors’ research. The IMRD structure was decomposed, combined, and reorganized when authors wrote English summaries. Authors reported their research in relatively diverse ways in summaries than in abstracts.

Keywords

• genre analysis
• english abstracts
• english summaries
• extended abstracts
• scholarly communication