Have you ever wondered why abstracts are often written in the third person? It seems quite weird that a researcher who has spent months writing and rewriting, not to mention the time spent gathering data, submits an abstract where “the author” suggests this or that. Why not “I” (or “we”)?
There are conventions, I know, and these conventions of the research article go back some time (an explanation as to why the format is today quite conservative). But this simplified conclusion – “there are conventions” – misses the point: Whereas many of the genre conventions are there for a reason, it is, if you ask me, hard to find a good reason for the use of third person. Zlatan Ibrahimovic refers to himself in third person – but researchers?
The thing is, while there may not be a good reason, there may be an explanation. Have you heard of secondary (or abstracting) journals?
If not, a chapter in Information Sources in Biotechnology (1986) is fascinating read. According to Anita Crafts-Lighty, in the chapter “Abstracting and secondary sources”, abstracting journals have for many years “served two vital functions as information sources”.
– They have provided a convenient way to search past literature for items of interest and they have enabled readers to learn of the existence of relevant publications appearing in sources not held by their local library, Crafts-Lighty explains.
Those were the days, old sport! Abstracting and secondary sources provided researchers with a convenient way to find “items of interest” and “learn of the existence of relevant publications appearing in sources not held by their local library”.
Yes, you’re right: Secondary journals flourished before there was a thing called “the Internet” (that is, at a time when local libraries were still filled with books).
Yes, you’re right: Secondary journals flourished before there was a thing called “the Internet” (that is, at a time when local libraries were still filled with books).
Back then, scholars could stay reasonably updated by skimming through a secondary journal every now and then. Since the journal – a collection of abstracts – was published with some delay, the presented findings were, at a minimum, two or three months old. But while this may have been a worry for scholars within the “hard” sciences, it surely cannot have been too big a problem for our fellow social scientist: Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922), received 645 citations as recently as last year (according to Google Scholar, I should add).
But back to my initial question: Why are abstracts often written in third person?
Crafts-Lighty is, once again, my source of authoritative knowledge:
– Abstracting journals […] contain a short informative summary of each listed paper, usually about one paragraph long. This may be either the author’s own abstract prepared when the article was first written, a new abstract written by staff of the abstracts journal (usually in a carefully controlled way) or a modified version of the author’s abstract (italics added).
Note the use of (carefully controlled) italics: The “informative summary” was sometimes written, entirely or partly, by members of the editorial staff – hence the use of the third person.
Eureka.
EU-RE-KA!
However, after a moment of euphoric triumph, I realise that the involvement of the editorial staff can only partially explain the use of the third person: Apparently, some of the abstracts were written by the author themselves, and if these too were written in the third person… well, the suggested explanation can then be contested. More than this, to be honest, it also introduces the possibility of there having been abstracts written in third person before there were abstracting journals.
Darn, this means that we’re back where we started!
Luckily, Aileen Fyfe at the University of St Andrews shares my interest in the history and form of the abstract, and in a recent post of hers, I learned that “in the 19th century, some entrepreneurs created journals whose purpose was to provide readers with summaries of articles published in other journals“. Notably, “the summary was written by a third-party, and was intended to stand in place of the full paper (rather than appearing alongside it)” (italics added).
Notably, whereas Fyfe’s account in no way contradicts with that of Crafts-Lighty, it does not mention author-generated abstracts: Abstracts were, essentially, “third party summaries” that stood in the place of a paper.
Abstracts were, essentially, “third party summaries” that stood in the place of a paper.
Continuing my reading of Fyfe’s truly captivating post, I found, to my great relief, that “the first explicit evidence we have of author-generated abstracts comes from 1892, when the [Royal] Society sought to relieve the burden on its secretaries by asking authors to supply an ‘abstract’” (italics added).
Abstracting journals existed before there were author-generated abstracts.
Hence, if an author-generated abstract in an abstracting journal was written in the third person, the most likely explanation is that the author wrote it with the format of the journal in mind: “Weird as it seems, I should in this thing they call ‘the abstract’ refer to myself as ‘the author’! These journals do have their ideas, don’t they?”
Yup, there are, as I noted in the very beginning of this text, these scholarly conventions. And whereas some of them are there for a good reason, others just linger on.
Be it as it may.
At Nordicom, only Zlatan will be allowed to use third person in the abstract.
Crafts-Lighty, A. (1986). Information sources in biotechnology. Macmillan Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08014-4