Medical and scientific journals often produce supplements that contain brief details or abstracts of items presented at conferences or meetings of professional organisations linked to the Journal Title. This common practice is a way for early research to be presented and discussed with conference participants.
They may be labelled as a poster session, a presentation or simply as a title that looks like a research paper. Unfortunately there is no actual "full" article to be found - the 'abstract' is all there is. These abstracts may be the only record of a piece of research because the study never progressed to full publication, or in some instances the research is still being conducted for reporting on at some point in the future.
Please do not use our Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service to place requests for items presented at conferences - we will only ever be able to give you the exact same abstract that you can already read online! It is not possible for ILL or other Library staff to perform a literature search for you to see if a full article was ever written following the conference presentation. There is advice below on how to check that yourself.
This is a different situation to the 'abstracts' you can see of research articles in the subject databases where the Library simply does not have access to the full paper in that database. If a full article actually exists, you are always welcome to use our ILL service to try and get a copy of it.
How can I tell a supplement abstract apart from a research article abstract?
- The issue number usually says 'S', 'Suppl', 'Supplement' or 'A' instead of just a number, e.g. S1, Supplement 1.
- The abstracts inside are usually sequentially numbered instead of having page numbers, e.g. H04.
- There will often be hundreds from the same event - because each presenter will have provided a brief summary of what they will talk about - whereas most journals will only publish a few research articles per issue.
How can I check if the abstract turned into a full article?
- Try looking at a citation site like Scopus or Google Scholar to see if the research did turn into a full article.
- Search for the author's surname and select keywords of the topic.
- Remember that the date of publication will be after the date of the abstract; it takes time to write and get a full paper accepted for publication in a Journal.
