Letter to the Editor [on using summaries to judge technical article submissions]

The author notes a number of complaints recently about the poor quality of some of the papers presented at technical meetings. He argues that a large part of the trouble is undoubtedly being caused by the difficulty of evaluating a paper from an abstract or a summary. He suggests that the central problem in the evaluation of papers is that the papers are not usually written until after they are accepted for presentation. One way to solve the problem would be to require that the complete paper be submitted for review. He believes that the best short form, from the standpoint of both reviewer and author, is the outline. He does not propose to eliminate the abstract; it is needed to publicize the paper. But he feels we should call it what it really is, a theme paragraph or, still better, let´s use book industry jargon and call it a blurb. What he does suggest is that the use of outlines for evaluation would simplify the review committee´s task without putting an unnecessary load on the author or affecting the timeliness of the paper.