Stock assessments are complicated and long, even the Executive Summary is long. Abstracts would provide readers with a short summary of the document. But, metadata associated with stock assessments does not include an abstract because the documents themselves do not have abstracts.
Proposed solution
Encourage stock assessment authors to create abstracts that can be included in the document and in the metadata. This could be done automatically using three or four sentences from the actual document itself. The sentences could be written as objects and strung together to create an abstract and also used as topic sentences in certain paragraphs throughout the assessment document. For example, the area that is included in the assessment, the current status of the stock relative to unfished, i.e., fraction unfished, and maybe two or three other things that are important. Please list ideas below in the comments that you think should be included.
The abstract could also be used in future assessments to summarize previous assessments in the Section titled "History of modeling approaches". We could use R to look up all old assessments in the bib file for the species of interest and then chronologically print the abstract from each assessment as text in the current assessment.
Potential problems
huge lift to write abstracts for previous assessments
Council is not currently use to seeing abstracts and didn't acknowledge @chantelwetzel-noaa effort to write a one-page summary
Problem
Stock assessments are complicated and long, even the Executive Summary is long. Abstracts would provide readers with a short summary of the document. But, metadata associated with stock assessments does not include an abstract because the documents themselves do not have abstracts.
Proposed solution
Encourage stock assessment authors to create abstracts that can be included in the document and in the metadata. This could be done automatically using three or four sentences from the actual document itself. The sentences could be written as objects and strung together to create an abstract and also used as topic sentences in certain paragraphs throughout the assessment document. For example, the area that is included in the assessment, the current status of the stock relative to unfished, i.e., fraction unfished, and maybe two or three other things that are important. Please list ideas below in the comments that you think should be included.
The abstract could also be used in future assessments to summarize previous assessments in the Section titled "History of modeling approaches". We could use R to look up all old assessments in the bib file for the species of interest and then chronologically print the abstract from each assessment as text in the current assessment.
Potential problems