Roundtable Participant: Susan Harris, American Psychological Association

MS. HARRIS: Thank you.

I am the Senior Director of the Journals Program at APA. In that capacity I'm responsible for the content input for the association. We have 45 journal products, 53 overall print and products that are journals, as well as newsletters and derivative products from the online. We actually feed the systems that develop Psych Info and psychology articles and psychology books and Psychology Extra.

So, for the APA, as an association publisher we actually span the total continuum of publishing, I like to say, from the editors' input and author input, all the way to final dissemination in print or online, and through our database systems, which are in some cases -- in normal publishing programs are a third party relationship. We actually span that entire continuum.

And as such, we are very much interested in what happens in abstracts, structured or otherwise. We are very interested in the most efficient way of communicating our science. And as such, we are looking always for better and improved ways of accomplishing that.

So, I'm pleased to able to be here and chat about abstracts. I will share with you that from the APA's perspective we do not use structured abstracts. We are the more traditional style of 120 words as a limit. And that has been largely driven by the fact that we are in fact dealing with all sorts of derivative products from print, as well as online that require that we have a very standard and short version of the abstract.

Now, I don't want that to suggest though that we don't have structure in our abstracts. I think it's a very important distinction. We have a publications manual you may have all heard about, the APA Style Manual, the bible of APA. In fact, I was sharing with Doug, my staff, our copyeditors, who are considered the style nazis, enforcing all those rules.

But in that book there is a section that deals with abstracts, specifically about what the intent is. What problem are we trying to solve with having an abstract? And what are the formats for which we should be considering the vast variety of content that we are dealing with?

And so, there are four or five different styles of what we say are the structure, not a structured abstract, but the structure of the abstracts to accommodate the fact that we have review articles, as well as experimental science using animals kinds of articles. We have history, which is just sort of a generic review of content, as well as those articles that deal primarily with practice and practice behaviors, and practice guidelines.

Given that vast variety of that, we have not been able to come up with one style that we feel really accommodates that broad base, as well as the broad base of end users we are dealing with, who are as you might expect, researchers, as well as clinicians, as well as those who are not even PhDs, but are actually masters and working in clinical settings as well.

So, for us the formal structure is not really one of those things that works for us. But in terms of what we really expect from an abstract, now our problem that we are trying to solve is what actually was referred to a little bit earlier. We are trying to get relevance established early in the relationship with the article. And we are trying to also create what the Google folks would call stickiness.

We want the reader to stay with the article, and to read deeper, and to drill down. And so, our journal structure is intended to accomplish that, but also our Psych Info and psychology article structure is meant to attract your attention, make a fast and easy decision about is this relevant for you, and then from then on it spiders out into those other articles that will be of interest to you. Now, that's not unique to Psych Info. That's typical of other search engines as well, but that certainly is the intent of our whole process.

That's probably enough for this stage of the discussion. Thank you.