We present a new summarisation task, taking scientific articles and producing journal table-of-contents entries in the chemistry domain. These are one- or two-sentence author-written summaries that present the key findings of a paper. This is a first look at this summarisation task with an open access publication corpus consisting of titles and abstracts, as input texts, and short author-written advertising blurbs, as the ground truth. We introduce the dataset and evaluate it with state-of-the-art summarisation methods.

We present two complementary annotation schemes for sentence based annotation of full scientific papers, CoreSC and AZ-II, applied to primary research articles in chemistry. AZ-II is the extension of AZ for chemistry papers. AZ has been shown to have been reliably annotated by independent human coders and useful for various information access tasks. Like AZ, AZ-II follows the rhetorical structure of a scientific paper and the knowledge claims made by the authors. The CoreSC scheme takes a different view of scientific papers, treating them as the humanly readable representations of scientific investigations. It seeks to retrieve the structure of the investigation from the paper as generic high-level Core Scientific Concepts (CoreSC). CoreSCs have been annotated by 16 chemistry experts over a total of 265 full papers in physical chemistry and biochemistry. We describe the differences and similarities between the two schemes in detail and present the two corpora produced using each scheme. There are 36 shared papers in the corpora, which allows us to quantitatively compare aspects of the annotation schemes. We show the correlation between the two schemes, their strengths and weeknesses and discuss the benefits of combining a rhetorical based analysis of the papers with a content-based one.