Workshop
Academic Writing
Abstract
1st April
Workshop
Activities
Source: Writing an Abstract for a Conference or Symposium
Instructions
GROUP 1
Abstract N 1
This paper aims to report a study of researchers’ preferences in selecting information from cited papers to include in a literature review, and the kinds of transformations and editing applied to the selected information. This is a part of a larger project to develop an automatic summarization method that emulates human literature review writing behaviour. Research questions were: how are literature reviews written – where do authors select information from, what types of information do they select and how do they transform it? What is the relationship between styles of literature review (integrative and descriptive) and each of these variables (source sections, types of information and types of transformation)?
The authors analysed the literature review sections of 20 articles from the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2001-2008, to answer these questions. Referencing sentences were mapped to 279 source papers to determine the source sentences. The type of information selected, the sections of source papers where the information was taken from, and the types of editing changes made to include in the literature review were analyzed.
The major findings show that integrative literature reviews contain more research result information and critique, and reference more information from the results and conclusion sections of the source papers. Descriptive literature reviews contain more research method information, and reference more information from the abstract and introduction sections. The most common kind of transformation is the high-level summary, though descriptive literature reviews have more cut-pasting, especially for information taken from the abstract. The types of editing – substitutions, insertions and deletions – applied to the
source sentences are identified.
The results are useful in the teaching of literature review writing, and indicate ways for automatic summarization systems to emulate human literature review writing. Though there have been several studies of abstracts and abstracting, there are few studies of literature reviews and literature review writing. Little is known about how writers select information from source papers, integrate it and present it in a literature review. This paper fills some of the gaps.
Literature review writing, Multi-document summarization, Information science, Information extraction, Information selection
GROUP 1
Group 2
t
ABSTRACT N2
The present study aims to investigate the quality of the structured versus unstructured abstracts in terms of content comprehensiveness and observing the items in APA manual.This survey uses a content analysis method. Data were collected through study of abstracts. Journals included in this study are as follows: Faslname-ye Ketab, Journal of Academic Librarianship and Information Science, Iranian Journal of Information Processing & Management, Library and Information Science Quarterly, Ganjine-ye Asnad, and Research on Information Sciences & Public Libraries. Of each publication, abstracts of 4 recent issues have been studied.Of 245 abstracts, 49.4 percent were structured and 50.6 percent were unstructured. The score mean for structured abstracts was higher than unstructured ones.
The most frequent omission from abstracts was information about ''conclusions" and the least omission
belonged to "purpose". It was revealed that most of Persian journals of LIS use structured abstracts,
although the structures used were not the same. Based on findings of the current study, it seems that a
structured format increases the quality of abstracts.
Abstracting, Library and Information Science Journals, Structured abstract, Unstructured Abstract.
Group 3
Abstract N3
Global governance in the context of global challenges
Renata Peciak
International community is facing multiple challenges of global nature. Because of supranational nature, many of occurring trends go beyond the scope and competences of individual states. This implies the necessity of coordinating actions that would allow for effective management of these challenges. The concept of global governance constitutes an attempt at searching for adequate global solutions.The objective of the paper is to discuss the essence of global governance concept approached as a network of relationships between various actors without hierarchical structure, the aim of which should be regulation of common matters through public and private institutions. This concept may not be analysed in isolation from the context of dynamic changes associated with globalisation processes that accelerated global governance. The second part of the paper presents the global context in a concise way. The last part is the analysis of conceptualisation of global governance, and it presents the most important issues that form the greatest barriers for effective global governance. Fragmentation and proliferation of institutions and actors, lack of legitimation and also complexity and uncertainty of contemporary global architecture are indicated among these problems. The paper assumes the following thesis: The idea of global governance has been developing very dynamically since its emergence in 1980s; however it still does not constitute a coherent concept that would be an effective instrument for management of global problems.
Group 3
Group 4
Abstract N4
Women's Emancipation Through Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis
In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.
Group 4