Abstracts
Types of Abstracts
According to OTC,
- Descriptive Abstracts
- very short (1-2 sentences)
- “teaser” of contents without any details or conclusions
- Informative Abstracts
- Contains key facts and conclusions
- Contains components of each major section of the report
- 10% of the length of the report or 2-3 pages, whichever is shorter
Types of Abstracts
I have never seen either type of abstract used in scientific articles.
Some government reports might use Informative Abstracts (but Exec Summary is more common)
Abstracts
From “The Scientific Guide to Writing” (Heard 2022)
- Abstracts were rare before 1920s, not routine until 1950s
None of the papers I have for this class from even the 1960s has an abstract - Widely available (even when paper is not) and searchable
- helps others find your research
- Mini IMRaD (Intro, Methods, Results, and Discussion) structure
- in Medicine, abstracts even have sections that make these pieces easier to find
- longer abstracts = better discovery by e.g. Google.
Abstracts
Follow journal style
- Structure
- Word limits
Must be self-contained
- usually no citations
- no references to figure/table
- try not to use acronyms
Some are afraid of “spoilers” – don’t worry about this in the abstract.
Can optimize abstracts to include keywords to help with search engine discovery.
Other considerations
Use active voice
Avoid non-alphanumeric characters (greek letters, unicode, etc.) because these can cause issues in databases
Don’t try to include secondary results unless you have no word limit
Practical Advice
- Draft abstract
- first and last sentence of each section in the paper
- main idea of each section in the paper
- Then, refine and make it make sense from there
Activity
Without looking at the abstract of your IgNobel paper (if there is one), write a short 5-6 sentence abstract for the paper.
Trade with a friend and compare their abstract to their paper (and/or the paper’s abstract if it exists)