What should an abstract cover

Reporting a new method for reprogramming adult mouse fibroblasts into induced cardiac progenitor cells. Lalit, Pratik A. Salick, Daryl O. Nelson, Jayne M. Squirrell, Christina M. Shafer, Neel G. Patel, Imaan Saeed, Eric G. Schmuck, Yogananda S. Markandeya, Rachel Wong, Martin R. Lea, Kevin W. Eliceiri, Timothy A. Hacker, Wendy C. Crone, Michael Kyba, Daniel J. Garry, Ron Stewart, James A. Thomson, Karen M. Downs, Gary E.

Lyons, and Timothy J. Reporting results about the effectiveness of antibiotic therapy in managing acute bacterial sinusitis, from a rigorously controlled study. A good informative abstract acts as a surrogate for the work itself. An informative abstract includes the information that can be found in a descriptive abstract purpose, methods, scope but also includes the results and conclusions of the research and the recommendations of the author. In the case of a longer work, it may be much less.

Here are examples of a descriptive and an informative abstract of this handout on abstracts. Descriptive abstract:. The two most common abstract types—descriptive and informative—are described and examples of each are provided. Abstracts present the essential elements of a longer work in a short and powerful statement. The purpose of an abstract is to provide prospective readers the opportunity to judge the relevance of the longer work to their projects. Abstracts also include the key terms found in the longer work and the purpose and methods of the research.

Authors abstract various longer works, including book proposals, dissertations, and online journal articles. There are two main types of abstracts: descriptive and informative. A descriptive abstract briefly describes the longer work, while an informative abstract presents all the main arguments and important results. This handout provides examples of various types of abstracts and instructions on how to construct one.

Your best bet in this case is to ask your instructor or refer to the instructions provided by the publisher. You can also make a guess based on the length allowed; i. The format of your abstract will depend on the work being abstracted.

An abstract of a scientific research paper will contain elements not found in an abstract of a literature article, and vice versa. However, all abstracts share several mandatory components, and there are also some optional parts that you can decide to include or not. When preparing to draft your abstract, keep the following key process elements in mind:.

When abstracting your own work, it may be difficult to condense a piece of writing that you have agonized over for weeks or months, or even years into a word statement. There are some tricks that you could use to make it easier, however. This technique is commonly used when you are having trouble organizing your own writing. The process involves writing down the main idea of each paragraph on a separate piece of paper— see our short video.

For the purposes of writing an abstract, try grouping the main ideas of each section of the paper into a single sentence. Practice grouping ideas using webbing or color coding.

For a scientific paper, you may have sections titled Purpose, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Each one of these sections will be longer than one paragraph, but each is grouped around a central idea. Use reverse outlining to discover the central idea in each section and then distill these ideas into one statement. To create a first draft of an abstract of your own work, you can read through the entire paper and cut and paste sentences that capture key passages.

This technique is useful for social science research with findings that cannot be encapsulated by neat numbers or concrete results.

A well-written humanities draft will have a clear and direct thesis statement and informative topic sentences for paragraphs or sections. Isolate these sentences in a separate document and work on revising them into a unified paragraph.

When abstracting something you have not written, you cannot summarize key ideas just by cutting and pasting. Instead, you must determine what a prospective reader would want to know about the work. The abstract should contain the most important key words referring to method and content: these facilitate access to the abstract by computer search and enable a reader to decide whether to read the entire dissertation.

Note: Your abstract should read like an overview of your paper, not a proposal for what you intended to study or accomplish. This paper will look at the human genome project and its goals. I will prove that scientists have ethical and moral questions about genetic engineering because of this project.

Begun in , the human genome project intends to map the 23 chromosomes that provide the blueprint for the human species. The project has both scientific and ethical goals. The scientific goals underscore the advantages of the genome project, including identifying and curing diseases and enabling people to select the traits of their offspring, among other opportunities. Ethically, however, the project raises serious questions about the morality of genetic engineering.

To handle both the medical opportunities and ethical dilemmas posed by the genome project, scientists need to develop a clear set of principles for genetic engineering and to continue educating the public about the genome project. The examples above are taken from Form and Style 10th ed.

Such statements can lead very naturally into a statement of how your research uniquely addresses the issue. AJE's abstract editing service is specifically designed to help you polish your abstract and meet word count limits. The methods section of your abstract is your chance to summarize the basic design of your study. Excessive detail is unnecessary; however, you should briefly state the key techniques used. Abstracts in biological or clinical fields should mention the organism, cell line, or population studied.

For ecology papers, the location of the study is often an important piece of information. Papers describing clinical trials should mention the sample size, patient groups, dosages, and study duration. Just as the abstract may be the most important part of your paper, the results subsection is likely the most important part of your abstract.

This is because the main reason that people are reading your abstract is to learn about your findings. Therefore, the results subsection should be the longest part of your abstract, and you should try to maximize the amount of detail you include here. The last sentences of your abstract should be devoted to the overall take-home message of your study: your conclusions. Then, state your main finding as concisely as possible. If you have other interesting secondary findings, these can be mentioned as well.