By Nicole Smith, WSU Vancouver Neuroscience Student
From talkinboutregeneration.wordpress.com/
How many times have you opened a book to read the blurb on the inside jacket, or even skim through a few sentences or pages to see if it could hold your interest? An “abstract” is to scientific research articles as blurbs are to books. Science is an ever advancing discipline, with data being generated at unprecedented paces and some journals publishing on a weekly basis. With an increase in the quantity of available scientific information, the quality and communication of these findings must compensate. An abstract helps to do just that, presenting a neatly packaged, informative summary of the research and its purpose.
Most research articles follow a rather rigid structure of introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion and conclusions, with a 1-2 paragraph abstract usually presented at the beginning of an article. An abstract’s author (the scientist(s) who conducted the research) usually devotes 1-3 sentences each to explaining what exactly he or she is researching, brief background material on their subject, the techniques used to carry out their experiment, and their most essential results and implications. These sentences should be direct, in-a-nutshell points, while still flowing together as a cohesive unit. Couched into the abstract should be a general purpose of their research, i.e., why does this matter?
Although much of published research focuses on heavy, complex issues, a well written abstract avoids the use of jargon, and defines the problems and processes at hand to make the research more accessible to an audience that may not be so familiar with science. It should also spare readers the nitty gritty details of complicated procedures, equations, or formulas, saving more in depth material for its appropriate section in the body of the paper. Aside from accessibility, abstracts provide a great way for potential readers to sift through what might be relevant to them. A marine biologist may not find a new computer algorithm particularly relevant to their field, but if the abstract mentions that the model predicts fish populations, they may find their interest piqued.
While most abstracts take on paragraph form, some journals separate abstracts into distinct subsections of an introduction, methods, and results. Abstracts for scientific conferences also vary slightly, making the information even more approachable as conference attendees likely have niche knowledge in their respective fields. Regardless, the point of an abstract remains to concisely summarize an overview of the research. Abstracts have also proven useful with the advent of electronic databases, where countless tomes of scientific research can be available at a user’s fingertips, helping to catalogue a user’s search results and even help them to decide if they should invest time (and often money) into reading an article further than its abstract. Because of this, scientists should be sure that their abstract can serve as an adequate, stand-alone representation of their work, as that may be all a reader sees. This could also work as an advantage to researchers, who can be sure to include relevant keywords in their abstract so as to optimize the chances of their work appearing in search engine results, a concept known as search engine optimization.
Some scientists are even utilizing the internet to provide supplementary abstracts of their work in videos hosted on Youtube. While these are geared toward a more lay audience, their efforts demonstrate that the abstract can keep research interesting and accessible in a powerful way. Scientific articles are dense, sometimes intimidating representations of research that require a lot of time and mental devotion, even for the most seasoned researcher. Instead of rifling through lengthy, technical descriptions and busy graphs, abstracts advance science interest and communication, putting compact and engaging summaries into the hands of the public as well as current and future scientists.