Chapter 14 Writing your abstract
Time is pressing on us all, and we often don’t have time to read everything to find out whether it is relevant to our own studies. This is why the abstract of the paper is so useful. It allows the reader to read a single paragraph and determine whether it is worth investing the time to read the entire article.
The abstract is a concise paragraph that sums up the major points of your manuscript.
Abstracts are also useful in that they are generally available, even when the paper itself might be behind a paywall. Therefore they allow us to decide whether or not to try to obtain that valued article.
Abstracts along with keywords are also searchable in literature databases, meaning that we have another opportunity to craft into the abstract keywords that will help readers find our work.
Abstracts are also needed when you want to present your work at a conference either orally or as a poster. You will need to submit your abstract well ahead of the meeting so that the scientific committee can assess your input and where it should be presented (if at all) in the meeting. Many people submit an abstract even though their work is not finished. In which case, which aspects do you think they omit?
14.1 The challenge
Many students find abstract writing challenging, because there is usually a word limit (typically 250-300 words), and you are trying to summarise the entire study into a very short space.
Many of the skills that we have already learned in writing can be applied to the abstract.
- start with a plan
- know which parts of your study you want to include
- and which you will omit
- know what style your target journal needs
- and how many words
- construct your table using a check-list to make sure you have all the aspects
- decide on your take-home-message
14.2 The abstract formula
Just like other parts of your written work, it’s useful to have a formula for your abstract so that you can start to write, and make sure that you have included everything that is relevant. As we will see (below), you don’t necessarily have to stick to one sentence for each of the aspects described in Table 14.1), but it does provide you with a good starting place.
| Introduction | |
|---|---|
| theme & topic | This is the big idea that the study fits within, and the sub-discipline in which your study is based. Identify the gap in knowledge that you are trying to fill. |
| variables | Dependent (what you measure) and independent (what you manipulate) variables in your study. |
| hypothesis or problematic | The question that the study is designed to answer. |
| Materials & Methods | |
| study system | Name the study system that you have used. This can be a cell, an organ, a species, a group of species, or an ecological system |
| approach | This is the type of study that you are conducting. The type of experimental design or observational study type. |
| Results | |
| major result | State what the relationship between the dependent and independent variables were - remember to include directionality. Also include effect size. |
| Discussion | |
| respond to the hypothesis | State whether the hypothesis was accepted and the most important implication of this finding. |
| implications for the theme or topic | State how should people working in this area adjust their understanding in light of this result. |
| take-home-message | Provide the take-home-message that you would like readers to remember. |
14.3 Exercise 1: De-constructing a published abstract
In this exercise we are going back to the keywords that you first identified at the beginning of this course (see here). Run your keyword search term that you constructed here, and polished in Step 3 in your literature database. Take the latest 5 papers that have been published using these keywords which are relevant to your topic (they should all be relevant to your topic, otherwise you need to go back and do some polishing). For each paper construct a table as follows:
| Aspect | Write your brief description here |
|---|---|
| Introduction | |
| theme & topic | |
| variables | |
| hypothesis or problematic | |
| Materials & Methods | |
| study system | |
| approach | |
| Results | |
| major result | |
| Discussion | |
| respond to the hypothesis | |
| implications for the theme or topic | |
| take-home-message |
Without downloading or reading any of the article, use the abstract as published on the literature database and attempt to fill in the entire table for each paper. Try to use your own words, and do not copy-paste anything from the abstract into the table.
Q1. Can you complete the table for every paper? If not which aspects were missing, and were they the same for every paper?
Q2. Was the information in abstract ordered in the same way as the table? If not, how did this order change?
Q3. Did any of the aspects share a sentence with any other aspect? If so, how were these combined?
14.4 Abstracts & Key-words
Because most article searches include both abstracts and key-words, if you have covered most of your key-words in your abstract, then you don’t need to include them again in your list of key-words. Remember to consult your visualised network of key-words when you are considering both your abstract and key-word content. The more you can fit into your abstract the more likely you are that people will find and read your study.
14.5 Exercise 2: Which key-words are already in the abstract
Using the five abstracts that you selected for Exercise 1, look through each and highlight how many of your key-words from your key-word search term are present in the abstract? Compare this to how many of them are present in the list of key-words.
Q1. Are there any repeats?
Note how the authors have crafted the abstract to include key-words that you are interested in searching for.
Q2. Could you do any better? Did the authors miss opportunities to add extra key-words into their abstract?
14.6 Abstract names and formats
Not every journal uses the word Abstract. Some use Summary, Synthesis or even print the abstract without a title or header. Essentially, they all mean the same thing, but the format may be different (see Figure 14.1).
FIGURE 14.1: Abstracts published in different journals with different styles. Top Left: The standard paragraph style. Top Right: Simple numbered style with one or two sentences per numbered point. Note that the last point is prescribed to practical aspects in this applied journal. Bottom Left: Fully structured style with headings that you should conform to. Bottom Right: Another type of fully structured style.
The most common abstract format is a single paragraph. This allows you free reign to mix up your discussion, results and even the introduction to form the most concise and readable text possible. But some journals force you into a structured abstract that sets out Aims, Introduction, Methods, Results and Conclusion. Others may have simple numbering or bullet points for your abstract, and still others have semi-structured abstracts where they dictate one or more points that must be included.
If you are writing an abstract for a chapter in your thesis, then keep it to a simple paragraph (majority approach). If you are writing for a particular journal, then make sure you visit that journal website before you start writing so that you know what they require. Also take note of their abstract word limit when you visit their website.
14.7 Exercise 3: Making your abstract concise
We have already discussed various ways in which you can make your writing concise when were were learning to write paragraphs. There is also an entire chapter on this subject available to you about writing concisely. Your challenge in this exercise is to take your favourite table from Exercise 1, and decide which of the aspects can be combined into single sentences to make the abstract fit into 200 words.
For example, you don’t need two sentences about the hypothesis. You can both pose the question and answer it in one sentence. Similarly, you don’t need separate sentences to tell us what the dependent and independent variables are and how they are related. These can be combined. See which other aspects of your favourite abstract could be combined and attempt to produce a single paragraph in which there are less than 200 words, but where all of the aspects in your table are covered.
Hint: Start by using all the aspects in bullet points. Then combine and condense. Then decide upon the final order and reconstruct your abstract. You can use a word counter to make sure that you don’t go over the limit.
14.8 Avoiding ‘spin’
Authors may try to represent their manuscript in a more positive light by intentionally or unintentionally overinterpreting, or even misinterpreting, their results. This often happens in the abstract as a way to pull readers in. The biomedical literature is especially full of spin (Chiu, Grundy, and Bero 2017), and this impacts on the accuracy of research dissemination.
Ghannad et al. (2021) conducted a randomised control trial to determine whether spin could be reduced in abstracts. Authors in the intervention group received instructions along with peer review comments telling authors to
- focus on the primary aim and primary outcome of your study
- include only information supported by the evidence and in accordance with your results
- avoid interpretation that is inconsistent with the study results
- avoid recommendations not justified by the findings
Despite receiving these quite specific instructions that should have been enough for authors to recognise and remove spin from their articles, Ghannad et al. (2021) found that abstracts from the intervention group had the same amount of spin as those abstracts where authors received no specific instructions. Happily, there is evidence that the peer review process in general does reduce spin content (Mayo-Wilson et al. 2021).
We should avoid spin, and the set of instructions above are a good way in which to make sure that you do not overinterpret your findings - either unintentionally or intentionally.
14.9 Summing up the workshop on writing your abstract
Writing isn’t easy, but you can help yourself by using a plan.
Use a check-list to make sure that all of the aspects needed in your abstract are present.
Remember the tips on how to write concisely in order condense the text to the word count needed.
This is the end of this workshop on writing writing your abstract. If you find any problems with this workshop, please be sure to let me know. Email: jmeasey@ynu.edu.cn