Seminar: What have we learned from our bilingual evaluative research on abstracts in Economics?
Abstract of a paper by Dr. Walker and economist José Roberto Novaes de Almeida, Ph.D, entitled ”Economical Abstracts.”
Background: Scholars have a responsibility to inform the world community of findings which may be of relevance outside of their own country or linguistic area. Even if the entire text is not published in English, the abstract should be. For empirical research, “informative abstracts,” using the five “moves” included in structured abstracts such as this one, should generally be included, corresponding to the structure of the text itself.
Aim: The 26 articles published in the Revista Brasileira de Economia (RBE) in 2010, including their abstracts, were critically analyzed and suggestions for improvement in the abstracts were made.
Method:
A simple word count was done for each abstract, in English and Portuguese. Then each clause (or occasionally phrase) was given one, or occasionally more than one, identifying number from 1 to 5, representing the moves. Mistakes and areas of possible improvement in the English abstracts were highlighted. Slack was identified.
Results:
Only half (7 of 14) of the abstracts in the group with the full text in Portuguese fall within the journal’s 100-word limit, versus 8 of the 11 with the full text in English. Three of the 14 abstracts of articles written in Portuguese, and three of the 11 written in English, had no explicit move 4 (results) – although some made rather confusing reference to results in the Conclusion. Terminology and English expression did not present major problems, except for one false cognate apparently due to an unchecked machine translation, and other cases of translators taking excessive liberty.
Conclusions: Informative English Abstracts which do not report findings (i.e., are missing move 4) are rare nowadays in international journals, and may often be seen as defective. The RBE’s word limit should be increased and brought into line with standard recommendations and with that of similar journals (usually 250 words). Abstractors need to be familiar with the foundations of the mathematics and statistics commonly employed in economics research, and economists may need to improve their own writing and abstracting skills. Further research might investigate citations. Are even articles written in Portuguese, but with good abstracts in English, cited in the international literature? Are articles that are seen to be highly relevant to current theoretical or practical issues neglected, due in part to inadequate abstracts?
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