It would be nice if more abstracts are available.

Here is an example which might be useful as starting point, using a perl script generating csv files with abstracts for a selection of conferences: Abstract Acquisition Scripts.

Investigation in copyright etc is recommended prior to retrieval of abstracts/other metadata from various websites.

This would enable suggestions based on text in abstracts/titles using the more-like-this functionality of lucene (available in webdsl), helping users to explore more publications of interest.

Submitted by Elmer van Chastelet on 12 March 2012 at 13:05

Or we might use the search details using Mendeley’s open API, with a usage rate of max 500/hour, i.e. 100 days for 1.2M pubs.

Tried mendeley open api on a number of papers, but none of them returned the abstracts in the json reply, while abstracts are present on mendeleys website.
see also: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mendeley-open-api-developers/k5uhtQSrabg/jCUdSOWjxSMJ