Advice for Writing Abstracts for Research Articles

Compiled by ABC for English 122, Fall 2019

Genre Description: An abstract is perhaps the most essential part of a research paper. It
is like a movie trailer. People will only consider reading the rest of the manuscript if they find
your abstract interesting. An abstract emerges as a tool to communicate your research
succinctly while highlighting its most important facets.
An abstract summarizes, usually in one paragraph of 300 words or less, the major aspects of
the entire paper in a prescribed sequence that includes:
 the overall purpose of the study and the research problem(s) you investigated;
 the basic design of the study;
 major findings or trends found as a result of your analysis; and,
 a brief summary of your interpretations and conclusions.

My search process: For my writing, I googled few things like, “How to write a good
abstract for a research paper”, “Tips for writing good abstracts for research papers” etc. and
came along various diverse sources which included university writing centers, institutions
involved in scientific publications, and technical-writing bloggers. Most of these sources
aimed at giving advices about how to write an effective abstract for a research paper,
however interestingly, some had even included what not to write in an abstract. The most
beneficial sources, that I found during my search were the following:

“Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: 3. The Abstract”

https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/abstract
This source is part of a website from the University of Southern California. This source
provides information about how to write different academic genre. For the genre of my
interest, it has effectively elaborated how to compose it and in the end has also mentioned
what not to include in the abstracts.

“How to Write a Good Scientific Abstract”

https://www.ptglab.com/news/blog/how-to-write-a-good-scientific-abstract/
This source has highlighted the importance of an abstract and has given several tips to write
it effectively.

“Make a Great First Impression: 6 Tips for Writing a Strong Abstract”

https://www.aje.com/arc/make-great-first-impression-6-tips-writing-strong-abstract/
Here, I found that six tips were given about the abstracts and then each of these tips was
elaborated.

“A 10-step guide to make your research paper abstract more effective”

https://www.editage.com/insights/a-10-step-guide-to-make-your-research-paper-abstract-
more-effective
This source has mentioned the ten steps concisely and can be regarded as an easy and
eleventh-hour tool to gather information about writing an abstract.
Exemplars: I have gone through some of the research papers from some Elsevier published
journals like Computers and Geotechnics, Construction and Building Materials, Soil
Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering etc. I found that all of them had their abstracts written
as per the guidelines mentioned. Most of them were 200 – 300 words long, presented in a
single paragraph in a block format and contained the gist of the whole paper.

My own summary of the Top Ten Pieces of Advice for Writing Research Article Titles
(in Count-Down Order):
10. Though much of your abstract may require passive sentence constructions, use the
active voice when possible.
9. Always use the past tense because you are reporting on a study that has been
completed.
8. Abstracts should be formatted as a single paragraph in a block format and with no
paragraph indentations.
7. Ask a colleague to review your abstract and check if the purpose, aim, methods, and
conclusions of the study are clearly stated.
6. Before handing in your final paper, check to make sure that the information in the
abstract completely agrees with what you have written in the paper.
5. State a take home message which is the most essential part of your abstract as it may be
the only thing people will remember about your entire project.
4. Avoid using lengthy background, acronyms and references to other literature in your
abstract.
3. Strictly follow the journal guidelines.
2. The final sentences of an abstract concisely summarize your study’s conclusions,
implications, or applications to practice and, if appropriate, can be followed by a
statement about the need for additional research revealed from the findings.
1. Although it is the first section of your paper, the abstract should be written last since
it will summarize the contents of your entire paper.

Ideas for Future Exploration: If I really wants to gain expertise in writing good and
effective abstracts, I believe that I should follow the following steps:
1. Read as many reputed research papers along with their abstracts as I can. And then
compare the information provided by the full-length research paper with that provided
in the abstract.
2. After following step 1 for a good amount of time, read few more research papers, this
time without abstracts. Now start writing my own abstract for the paper. Then finally
comparing my abstract with the one already written by the authors
Following these steps, I believe, will help a lot in gaining expertise in writing good abstracts.