The Importance of reading original articles or papers as opposed to relying on the information in the abstracts.

An abstract is an electronic database that indexes books, journals and other information. It is a short summary of the material indexed. Relying on abstracts as opposed to the original article or paper is of discouraged since they give little actual information. For example an abstract can have the sentence,” The relationship between academic performance and delinquency was determined” without telling what the relationship was.