Abstracting and Indexing Services: Meaning, Types, Methods, Importance, Benefits and Challenges
Introduction The rapid growth of scholarly and professional literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers, students, librarians, and other information users to identify relevant publications. Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) Services help address this challenge by organizing published literature and making it easier to discover, retrieve, evaluate, and use. An abstracting service provides concise summaries of documents, while an indexing service identifies and organizes documents using descriptive elements such as authors, titles, subjects, keywords, citations, and other access points. Together, abstracting and indexing services help users locate relevant information without having to examine every document in a collection. They are therefore important components of modern information retrieval, scholarly communication, research support, and library services. As libraries increasingly operate in digital and networked environments, A&I services have...
