How to write an abstract

Abstract

BackgroundA scientific abstract is a shortened version of a scientific paper. It is, aside from the title, the most frequently read and most easily accessed portion of an article reporting original scientific research. 1 Often, readers of a scientific journal will only read the abstract, choosing to read at length those papers that are most interesting to them. For this reason, and because abstracts are frequently made available to readers by various computer abstracting services, this section should be written succinctly, in order to have the greatest impact in as few words as possible. 2 However, reading an abstract has never been a substitute for reading the entire article, since crucial details of the study are most often not addressed in this section. 3 Broadly, two types of abstracts exist. Indicative or descriptive abstracts deal with the content of the entire paper, whereas informative abstracts summarise the entire paper and provide an overview of the facts laid out in detail in the paper itself. These days, most abstracts are informative. 4 Respected scientific journals began publishing abstracts in 1956, while structure was not added until 1991. 5 Only about 50% of research projects that are initially submitted as conference abstracts, will eventually be published as full articles in peer-reviewed journals and full publication may not occur for several years. 6 As a result, a published abstract from a scientific meeting is often the only permanent source of information available on the methodology and results of a research project.Accurately reflecting the contents of the entire paper seems the most basic requirement for an abstract. 1 However, it was found that 18-68% of 264 abstracts in six major general medical journals, i.e. Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med), had data in the abstract that were either inconsistent with or absent from the main body of the article. 7 This finding is especially worrying, since abstracts are widely used, often in separation from the original text, and data from the abstracts may be reported and disseminated in other works, other formats, and in the media. 1 It is against this background that we describe here structures for writing an abstract of an original study or review and the quality criteria used to assess such abstracts. SummarySince the abstracts of original papers are one of their most frequently read and most easily accessible elements, they should be as informative and accurate as possible. It is therefore worrying that 18-68% of 264 abstracts from six major general medical journals, were shown to contain data that were either inconsistent with or absent from the main body of the article. This paper provides an overview of published structures for writing an abstract of an original study or review and quality criteria to assess such abstracts. Guidelines for struct...

Differences in Research Abstracts written in Arabic, French, and English

“…Ebrahimi & Chan (2015), who compared abstracts in applied linguistics to those in economics, claim that the writer's discipline sometimes informs the structure of abstract writing. Vrijhoef & Steuten (2007) report that many journals do not provide adequate guidelines of abstract writing and thus many of them contain unstructured abstracts. They also report that some medical publications either contain inconsistent data or do not process the data given in abstracts.…”

Natural Language Processing Adoption in Governments and Future Research Directions: A Systematic Review

“…A literature analysis differs from a systematic review in that complete text screening is only carried out when essential [47]. Since the abstracts of original papers are informative and accurate [48], they can concisely and clearly describe one's work; therefore, this study utilised the abstracts of the collected papers to conduct the literature analysis. For this reason, we refer to the first two steps of this method for data collection.…”

Writing a Scientific Review Article: Comprehensive Insights for Beginners

“…Furthermore, the abstract must be consistent with the rest of the paper; as basic as this instruction might sound, it is not to be taken for granted. For example, a study by Vrijhoef and Steuten [ 56 ] revealed that 18–68% of 264 abstracts from some scientific journals contained information that was inconsistent with the main body of the publications.…”