Trends in Writing Abstracts for Bulgarian Scientific Journals: Language Analysis

Abstract

The abstract as a mandatory requisite of the scientific publication is the first and sometimes the only part of it to which the reader has access. Its communicative role is to present the publication and to initiate interaction between the primary publication and the audience. The object of this research are the trends in the language and style of writing abstracts in the system of scientific publishing in Bulgaria. The subject of immediate research interest is the text-linguistic characteristics of abstracts in Bulgarian. The purpose of the research is to outline some current trends in the language used in written abstracts in electronic scientific journals in Bulgaria. There are three tasks: extracting selected abstracts from Bulgarian scientific journals with online access, according to predefined criteria; presentation of findings on publishing practices for creating and publishing abstracts; making a linguistic analysis of the empirical material. The main research methods are analysis of international standards of abstracting and linguistic analysis of the selected abstracts. The first hypothesis of the study is that scientific publishing in Bulgaria follows global trends and international standards for creating quality scientific content, including abstracts. The second hypothesis is that publications in different scientific fields have different approaches to the content of the scientific abstract, and this affects the accessibility of its language. As a result of the study, a tendency was established for a lack of sufficient control over abstracts on the part of publishers. Authors, regardless of the scientific field of the journal in which they publish, prefer a structured text with clearly outlined major points. Condensing scientific information and presenting it in an intelligible manner in the abstract are key skills that need to be improved.