Help topic: Abstracts

Abstracts of journal articles are available to all users of Cambridge Journals Online and can be accessed from a journal's tables of contents or a list of search results. As well as a short description of the article's contents, the abstract provides the following information:

- The article's DOI

- The article's online publication date

- The date the article was originally accepted for publication. (This is provided by the journal's editorial office and may not be available for all journals.)

- The names and affiliations of the author(s)

- Contact details for those wishing to enter into correspondence with the author(s)

- Where available, a link to Medline's database of authors

- A list of the keywords that have been used to index the article

Features for registered users

If you are a registered user and logged in you can also:

- Take out an online subscription to the journal by clicking on Subscribe to Journal (see Help on 'Shopping basket')

- Save the abstract to your Saved Articles page (see Help on 'Saved articles')

- Sign up to receive new Contents Alerts (see Help on 'Content alerts')

- Email the Abstract to an interested colleague (see Help on 'Email Abstract')

- Receive Citation Alerts if the article is cited elsewhere (see Help on 'Citation Alerts'). Note: this feature appears in the menu at the top right of page.

If you are a registered user but have not logged in and would like to use one of these features, you can click on the 'Log in' link which will allow you to log in using your username (or email) and password or your Athens log in. To register at this point, simply click on 'Register' and follow the instructions.

Other useful features for all users

Clicking on A Link to the Abstract/Details of this Article brings up a link which you can then cut and paste into your web pages or documents.

How to Cite this Article provides a complete citation (including the DOI) for you to cut and paste into your own work or bibliographic software.

Export Citation allows you to download the citation to your desktop or to email it to a colleague.

If you belong to one of the following social bookmarking or networking sites, you can automatically add the abstract to it by clicking on Social Bookmarking: CiteULike, Del.icio.us, Connotea.org, Bibsonomy.org, Furl.net, Digg.com, Reddit.com, Facebook.

The menu at the top right of the Abstract's window also contains a number of useful features. The first two items are a quick way of navigating to the journal homepage or to the table of contents for the issue the article appears in. If you have access to the full text of the journal, you will see links to the PDF and HTML versions of the article. Otherwise you will see a link that allows you to buy the article on a pay-per-view basis.

Clicking on Request Permissions takes you to the Copyright Clearance Center's Rightslink service. This will tell you if you can obtain permission to re-use some or all of the article and, if you can, lets you buy the license to do so online.

Next you will see Cited by Articles (CrossRef) and Cited by Articles (Google Scholar). If you click on either of these links a new window will open which lists - and provides links to - articles in CrossRef or Google Scholar that cite the article you are viewing.

Some Cambridge journals are encouraging debate by asking readers to respond to individual articles. Click on Comments to submit your comment to a moderator. By clicking on Comment alerts you can receive alerts whenever a new comment on this article is posted on Cambridge Journals Online.

Blog this Article is a quick and easy way to cite an article in your blog or online community profile. A new window opens containing some code which you can cut and paste into your blog. The code will display as the article's title, author(s), the journal issue it appears in and it will give a link to the article's abstract.

Symbols in articles and abstracts

Every effort has been made to represent special character symbols (for example, the Greek symbol kappa) correctly within articles and abstracts. Where Web browsers cannot represent these symbols correctly, they are converted to image files.